Federal judge’s raging dissent calling TV a ’Democratic Party trumpet” stuns legal analysts

A federal judge unleashed a bizarre rant against the media in his dissent in a First Amendment case.

The D.C. Circuit Court threw out a defamation case filed by a pair of Liberian officials against Global Witness because the plaintiffs failed to "plausibly" show actual malice -- but dissenting Judge Laurence Silberman argued that the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan decision establishing that legal standard because the media is too biased against conservatives, reported Slate.

"Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets," Silberman, wrote. "And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television — network and cable — is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along."

The 85-year-old Silberman,, who was appointed to the court in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan, then quoted former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev who argued that the media was trying to impose socialism.

"'When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries,' Leonid Brezhnev, Remarks to the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party (Nov. 13, 1968)," Silberman, wrote. "Thus, one [sic] a country has turned communist, it can never be allowed to go back."