Last year I wrote a guest essay for the New York Times about the media organizations that were paying Donald Trump obscene amounts of money to settle the feeble or frivolous lawsuits he’d filed against them during the presidential campaign. I pointed out that “the First Amendment gives American publishers and platforms rights that are the envy of their counterparts around the world.” I said it was “frightening and dispiriting” that so few of these organizations seemed to have the will or courage to assert those rights. When I was invited more recently to deliver the Horace E. Read Memorial...