Recent years have seen an uptick in people worried that the standard set for defamation in New York Times v. Sullivan is too high. The decision, it is said with a good deal of truth, fosters reckless journalism and the dissemination of falsehoods. This Washington Post article on a recently defeated Florida bill to address these concerns statutorily might give some critics (myself included) pause. The defeated bill would have taken two significant steps toward making defamation suits easier to bring. First, it sought to narrow who qualifies as “a public figure” thereby granting more people a plausible path to a successful defamation case including against the press. Second, and perhaps more shockingly, it created a presumption that anonymous sources were false.