Court Opinion

ID: 9472947
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:15:27.288543+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:14.460584
License: Public Domain

BORK, Circuit Judge, with whom WIL-KEY and GINSBURG, Circuit Judges, and MacKINNON, Senior Circuit Judge,
join, concurring:
While I concur in the judgment of the court and in much of Judge Starr’s scholarly exposition, I write separately because I do not think he has adequately demonstrated that all of the allegedly libelous statements at issue here can be immunized as expressions of opinion. The dissents, on the other hand, while acknowledging the importance of additional factors, seem actually premised on the idea that the law makes a clear distinction between opinions, which are not actionable as libel, and facts, which are. In my view, the law as enunciated by the Supreme Court imposes no such sharp dichotomy. Some lower courts have assumed, as do some members of this court, not only that this opinion vs. fact formula is controlling but that it is governed, at least primarily, by grammatical analysis. I think that incorrect. Any such rigid doctrinal framework is inadequate to resolve the sometimes contradictory claims of the libel laws and the freedom of the press.
This case illustrates that point. It arouses concern that a freshening stream of libel actions, which often seem as much designed to punish writers and publications as to recover damages for real injuries, may threaten the public and constitutional interest in free, and frequently rough, discussion. Those who step into areas of public dispute, who choose the pleasures and distractions of controversy, must be willing to bear criticism, disparagement, and even wounding assessments. Perhaps it would be better if disputation were conducted in measured phrases and calibrated assessments, and with strict avoidance of the ad hominem; better, that is, if the opinion and editorial pages of the public press were modeled on The Federalist Papers. But that is not the world in which we live, ever have lived, or are ever likely to know, and the law of the first amendment must not try to make public dispute safe and comfortable for all the participants. That would only stifle the debate. In our world, the kind of commentary that the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak have engaged in here is the coin in which controversialists are commonly paid.
*994These reflections lead me to conclude that Professor Oilman cannot press a libel action. But I do not find it easy to reach that result through a blunt distinction between opinion and fact, which while sometimes useful in just that crude dichotomy, is not adequate to the task here.
This inadequacy is most apparent in dealing with what Judge Starr calls “the most troublesome statement in the column,” that concerning Oilman’s reputation. It will be well to place the statement more completely in its context. Toward the end of their column, Evans and Novak say this:
Oilman’s principal scholarly work, “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society,” is a ponderous tome in adoration of the master (Marxism “is like a magnificently rich tapestry”). Published in 1971, it does not abandon hope for the revolution forecast by Karl Marx in 1848. “The present youth rebellion,” he writes, by “helping to change the workers of tomorrow” will, along with other factors, make possible “a socialist revolution.”
Such pamphleteering is hooted at by one political scientist in a major eastern university, whose scholarship and reputation as a liberal are well known. “Oilman has no status within the profession, but is a pure and simple activist,” he said. Would he say that publicly? “No chance of it. Our academic culture does not permit the raising of such questions.”
Judge Starr’s opinion for the majority contends that, in the circumstances of this case and in the context of the column as a whole, the quoted statement that “Oilman has no status within the profession, but is a pure and simple activist” qualifies as an opinion and so is constitutionally protected. The dissents, on the other hand, suggest that an assertion about one’s general reputation is an assertion of fact. If common usage were the test, and if we looked at the sentence standing alone, the dissent’s characterization would certainly be correct. The challenged language is a statement that others hold a particular opinion. Whether or not they do is a question of fact, though, as I will try to show, it is a “fact” of a peculiar nature in the context of first amendment litigation. If placing the bare assertion in question into one of two compartments labelled “opinion” and “fact” were the only issue we were allowed to consider, I would join the dissent. But I do not think these simple categories, semantically defined, with their flat and barren descriptive nature, their utter lack of subtlety and resonance, are nearly sufficient to encompass the rich variety of factors that should go into analysis when there is a sense, which I certainly have here, that values meant to be protected by the first amendment are threatened.
The temptation to adhere to sharply-defined categories is understandable. Judges generalize, they articulate concepts, they enunciate such things as four-factor frameworks, three-pronged tests, and two-tiered analyses in an effort, laudable by and large, to bring order to a universe of unruly happenings and to give guidance for the future to themselves and to others. But it is certain that life will bring up cases whose facts simply cannot be handled by purely verbal formulas, or at least not handled with any sophistication and feeling for the underlying values at stake. When such a ease appears and a court attempts nevertheless to force the old construct upon the new situation, the result is mechanical jurisprudence. Here we face such a case, and it seems to me better to revert to first principles than to employ categories which, in these circumstances, inadequately enforce the first amendment’s design.
Viewed from that perspective, the statement challenged in this lawsuit, in terms of the policies of the first amendment, is functionally more like an “opinion” than a “fact” and should not be actionable. It thus falls within the category the Supreme Court calls “rhetorical hyperbole.” See pp. 975-79, infra. I will try to set out the factors in this case that justify application of that concept.
Because Evans and Novak wrote that an anonymous political science professor said *995he had “no status” among political scientists, Oilman wants to ask a jury to award him $1,000,000 in compensatory damages and an additional $5,000,000 in punitive damages. In the field of journalism, these are enormous sums. They are quite capable of silencing political commentators forever. Unless the defamation was heinous and devastating, the amounts sought are entirely disproportionate. No one would think it appropriate for a state to levy such amounts as fines upon writers for statements of the sort made here. But, under current doctrine, lower courts have no way of saying that such sums may not be sought in libel actions, Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 94 S.Ct. 2997, 41 L.Ed.2d 789 (1974), or, indeed, of saying that damages may not be awarded as punishment or that such components of compensation as psychological anguish are inconsistent with the first amendment when the libel occurs in a public, political dispute. Time, Inc. v. Firestone, 424 U.S. 448, 460, 96 S.Ct. 958, 968, 47 L.Ed.2d 154 (1976). Instead, unless we continue to develop doctrine to fit first amendment concerns, we are remitted to old categories which, applied woodenly, do not address modern problems.
The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification, and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings. Yet the area in which legal doctrine is currently least adequate to preserve press freedom is the area of defamation law, the area in which this action lies. We are said to have in the first amendment “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.” New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270, 84 S.Ct. 710, 721, 11 L.Ed.2d 686 (1964). That principle has resulted in the almost total abolition of prior restraints on publication; New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713, 91 S.Ct. 2140, 29 L.Ed.2d 822 (1971); Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539, 96 S.Ct. 2791, 49 L.Ed.2d 683 (1976); the curtailment of the possibility of criminal sanctions; Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 64, 85 S.Ct. 209, 13 L.Ed.2d 125 (1964); and, in Sullivan itself, the construction of serious obstacles to private defamation actions by government officials. The cases that came afterward deployed similar obstacles to defamation actions by “public figures,” Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, 388 U.S. 130, 87 S.Ct. 1975, 18 L.Ed.2d 1094 (1967); Rosenbloom v. Metromedia, Inc., 403 U.S. 29, 91 S.Ct. 1811, 29 L.Ed.2d 296 (1971); Gertz, 418 U.S. at 345, 94 S.Ct. at 3009. Thus, we have a judicial tradition of a continuing evolution of doctrine to serve the central purpose of the first amendment.
Judge Scalia’s dissent implies that the idea of evolving constitutional doctrine should be anathema to judges who adhere to a philosophy of judicial restraint. But most doctrine is merely the judge-made superstructure that implements basic constitutional principles. There is not at issue here the question of creating new constitutional rights or principles, a question which would divide members of this court along other lines than that of the division in this case. When there is a known principle to be explicated the evolution of doctrine is inevitable. Judges given stewardship of a constitutional provision — such as the first amendment — whose core is known but whose outer reach and contours are ill-defined, face the never-ending task of discerning the meaning of the provision from one case to the next. There would be little need for judges — and certainly no office for a philosophy of judging — if the boundaries of every constitutional provision were self-evident. They are not. In a case like this, it is the task of the judge in this generation to discern how the framers’ values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply to the world we know. The world changes in which unchanging values find their application. The fourth amendment was framed by men who did not foresee electronic surveillance. But that does not make it wrong for judges to apply the central value of that amendment to electronic invasions of personal privacy. *996The commerce power was established by men who did not foresee the scope and intricate interdependence of today’s economic activities. But that does not make it wrong for judges to forbid states the power to impose burdensome regulations on the interstate movement of trailer trucks. The first amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press was written by men who had not the remotest idea of modern forms of communication. But that does not make it wrong for a judge to find the values of the first amendment relevant to radio and television broadcasting.
So it is with defamation actions. We know very little of the precise intentions of the framers and ratifiers of the speech and press clauses of the first amendment. But we do know that they gave into our keeping the value of preserving free expression and, in particular, the preservation of political expression, which is commonly conceded to be the value at the core of those clauses. Perhaps the framers did not envision libel actions as a major threat to that freedom. I may grant that, for the sake of the point to be made. But if, over time, the libel action becomes a threat to the central meaning of the first amendment, why should not judges adapt their doctrines? Why is it different to refine and evolve doctrine here, so long as one is faithful to the basic meaning of the amendment, than it is to adapt the fourth amendment to take account of electronic surveillance, the commerce clause to adjust to interstate motor carriage, or the first amendment to encompass the electronic media? I do not believe there is a difference. To say that such matters must be left to the legislature is to say that changes in circumstances must be permitted to render constitutional guarantees meaningless. It is to say that not merely the particular rules but the entire enterprise of the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan was illegitimate.
We must never hesitate to apply old values to new circumstances, whether those circumstances are changes in technology or changes in the impact of traditional common law actions. Sullivan was an instance of the Supreme Court doing precisely this, as Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 492-95, 74 S.Ct. 686, 690-92, 98 L.Ed. 843 (1954), was more generally an example of the Court applying an old principle according to a new understanding of a social situation. The important thing, the ultimate consideration, is the constitutional freedom that is given into our keeping. A judge who refuses to see new threats to an established constitutional value, and hence provides a crabbed interpretation that robs a provision of its full, fair and reasonable meaning, fails in his judicial duty. That duty, I repeat, is to ensure that the powers and freedoms the framers specified are made effective in today’s circumstances. The evolution of doctrine to accomplish that end contravenes no postulate of judicial restraint. The evolution I suggest does not constitute a major change in doctrine but is, as will be shown, entirely consistent with the implications of Supreme Court precedents.
We now face a need similar to that which courts have met in the past. Sullivan, for reasons that need not detain us here, seems not to have provided in full measure the protection for the marketplace of ideas that it was designed to do. Instead, in the past few years a remarkable upsurge in libel actions, accompanied by a startling inflation of damage awards, has threatened to impose a self-censorship on the press which can as effectively inhibit debate and criticism as would overt governmental regulation that the first amendment most certainly would not permit. See Lewis, New York Times v. Sullivan Reconsidered: Time to Return to “The Central Meaning of the First Amendment, ” 83 Colum.L.Rev. 603 (1983).1 It is not merely the size of dam*997age awards but an entire shift in the application of libel laws that raises problems for press freedom. See Smolla, Let the Author Beware: The Rejuvenation of the American Law of Libel, 132 U.Pa.L.Rev. 1 (1983).2 Taking such matters into account is not, as one dissent suggests, to engage in sociological jurisprudence, at least not in any improper sense. Doing what I suggest here does not require courts to take account of social conditions or practical considerations to any greater extent than the Supreme Court has routinely done in such cases as Sullivan. Nor does analysis here even approach the degree to which the Supreme Court quite properly took such matters into account in Brown, 347 U.S. at 492-95, 74 S.Ct. at 690-92. Matters such as the relaxation of legal rules about permissible recovery, the changes in tort law to favor compensation, and the existence of doctrinal confusion, see Smolla, supra, are matters that courts know well. Indeed, courts are responsible for these developments.
The only solution to the problem libel actions pose would appear to be close judicial scrutiny to ensure that cases about types of speech and writing essential to a vigorous first amendment do not reach the jury.3 See Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States, Inc., - U.S.-, 104 S.Ct. 1949, 1965, 80 L.Ed.2d 502 (1984). This requires a consideration of the totality of the circumstances that provide the context in which the statement occurs and which determine both its meaning and the extent to which making it actionable would burden freedom of speech or press. That, it must be confessed, is a balancing test and risks admitting into the law an element of judicial subjectivity. To that objection there are various answers. A balancing test is better than no protection at all. Given the appellate process, moreover, the subjective judgment of no single judge will be controlling. Over time, as reasons are given, the element of subjectivity will be reduced. There is, in any event, at this stage of the law’s evolution, no satisfactory alternative. Hard categories and sharply-defined principles are admirable, if they are available, but usually, in the world in which we live, they share the problem of absolutes, of which they are a subgenre: they *998do not stand up when put to the test of hard cases. In the process of “balancing,” I will state my reasons fully so that it may be judged whether , they are rooted adequately in central first amendment concerns and so that guidance may be given as to how I think cases should be decided in the future.
Two general considerations lead me to conclude that Professor Oilman should not be allowed to try his case to a jury. First, the state of doctrine in this area, if not precisely embryonic, is certainly still developing. Nothing in case law that is binding upon this court requires us to ignore context and the purposes of the first amendment and, instead, to apply a rigid opinion-fact dichotomy and to define the compartments of that dichotomy by semantic analysis. Indeed, the Supreme Court has indicated that we are not to do that. See pp. 975-79, infra. We are required, therefore, to continue the evolution of the law in accordance with the deepest rationale of the first amendment. Second, the central concerns of the first amendment are implicated in this case so that a damage award would have a heavily inhibiting effect upon the journalism of opinion. On the other hand, the statement challenged, in practical impact, is more like an expression of opinion than it is like an assertion of fact. It is the kind of hyperbole that must be accepted in the rough and tumble of political argument.
I.
It is plain, I think, that the opinion-fact dichotomy is not as rigid as the various dissents suppose. There is no need to become caught up in a debate about the true nature of the allegedly libelous statement in terms of that dichotomy. The formalistic distinction between the two would be binding on us, sitting as an en banc court, only if the Supreme Court had required it. The thought that the Supreme Court has required it rests upon what I believe to be a misapprehension of dicta in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 328, 94 S.Ct. 2997, 41 L.Ed.2d 789. The facts of that case are important, if only by contrast with other cases, to an understanding of still-evolving doctrine in this area. Plaintiff Gertz was a lawyer who represented the family of a youth killed by a policeman in civil litigation against the policeman. In his capacity as counsel, Gertz attended the coroner’s inquest but otherwise did nothing more than press the civil suit. The defendant, which published a monthly magazine, ran an article that portrayed Gertz as “an architect of the ‘frame-up’ ” against the police officer, implied that Gertz had a lengthy criminal record, called him a “Leninist” and a “Communist-fronter,” and identified him as an official of an organization that advocated violent seizure of the government. 418 U.S. at 326, 94 S.Ct. at 3000. None of this was true. The Court introduced its discussion of the governing considerations with an observation that was not necessary to the decision:
We begin with the common ground. Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas. But there is no constitutional value in false statements of fact. Neither the intentional lie nor the careless error materially advances society’s interest in “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate on public issues. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S., at 270 [84 S.Ct. at 721]. They belong to that category of utterances which “are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 572 [62 S.Ct. 766, 769, 86 L.Ed. 1031] (1942).
Id,., 418 U.S. at 339-40, 94 S.Ct. at 3007 (footnote omitted).
In Gertz, it was obvious that most of the assertions that were the subject of the action purported to be flat statements of fact. The two statements that might arguably have been statements of opinion were *999that Gertz was a “Leninist” and a “Communist-fronter.” 418 U.S. at 326, 94 S.Ct. at 3000. The Court did not discuss their proper categorization. But as Judge Friendly said in Cianci v. New Times Publishing Co., 639 F.2d 54, 61 (2d Cir.1980), these assertions must have been “deemed sufficiently ‘factual’ to support an action for defamation,” since the Supreme Court remanded the case for jury trial.
For this reason, it is instructive to compare the Court’s treatment of an even more clearly “factual” assertion in Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Association v. Bresler, 398 U.S. 6, 90 S.Ct. 1537, 26 L.Ed.2d 6 (1970). Plaintiff Bresler, a real estate developer and builder, engaged in negotiations with the City Council of Greenbelt, Maryland, for zoning variances so that he could build high-density housing on land he owned. Simultaneously, the city was trying to acquire another tract of land from Bresler to construct a high school. The concurrent negotiations gave each side bargaining leverage. Bresler, of course, could vary the price for the tract depending on the city’s attitude toward the variances. A newspaper accurately reported the public debate at city council meetings at which Bresler’s negotiating demands were denounced as “blackmail.” Bresler sued, alleging that the articles imputed a crime to him. The Court held that this denunciation was a constitutionally protected statement since here the word “blackmail” was no more than “rhetorical hyperbole, a vigorous epithet used by those who considered Bresler’s negotiating position extremely unreasonable.” Id., 398 U.S. at 14, 90 S.Ct. at 1542. The context in which the words appeared was such that no reader could have thought that Bresler was charged with a crime.
The analytical approach of Bresler was reaffirmed in Old Dominion Branch No. 496, National Association of Letter Carriers v. Austin, 418 U.S. 264, 285-86, 94 S.Ct. 2770, 2781-82, 41 L.Ed.2d 745 (1974), a case argued and handed down on the same days as Gertz. In Letter Carriers, a union newsletter, Carrier’s Corner, published the names of those, including plaintiffs, who had not joined the union under the heading “List of Scabs.” Just above the list the newsletter printed a particularly derogatory definition of the term “scab” attributed to Jack London which included the statement that a scab was “a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.”4 The Court quoted the reasoning of Bresler about the meaning imparted by context and then said:
It is similarly impossible to believe that any reader of the Carrier’s Corner would have understood the newsletter to be *1000charging the appellees with committing the criminal offense of treason. As in Bresler, Jack London’s “definition of a scab” is merely rhetorical hyperbole, a lusty and imaginative expression of the contempt felt by union members towards those who refuse to join.
418 U.S. at 285-86, 94 S.Ct. at 2782 (footnote omitted).
A comparison of Gertz, on the one hand, with Bresler and Letter Carriers, on the other, indicates the actual state of the law. The fact that the epithets “Leninist” and “Communist-fronter” were deemed actionable, while the epithets “blackmail,” “scab,” and “traitor” were not, demonstrates that, when it comes to first amendment analysis, the Supreme Court does not employ a simplistic opinion-fact dichotomy. A statement that, on its face and standing alone, sounds like an assertion of fact may not be actionable. Context is crucial and can turn what, out of context, appears to be a statement of fact into “rhetorical hyperbole,” which is not actionable. Thus, it is clear that the Supreme Court, in the service of the first amendment, employs a test which requires consideration of the totality of the circumstances in which a statement appears.5
Courts other than the Supreme Court agree that context may make non-actionable statements that are facially assertions of fact. Thus, the Ninth Circuit has said that “even apparent statements of fact may assume the character of statements of opinion, and thus be privileged, when made in public debate, heated labor dispute, or other circumstances in which an ‘audience may anticipate efforts by the parties to persuade others to their positions by use of epithets, fiery rhetoric or hyperbole.’ ” Information Control Corp. v. Genesis One Computer Corp., 611 F.2d 781, 784 (9th Cir.1980). Moreover, “the test to be applied in determining whether an allegedly defamatory statement constitutes an actionable statement of fact requires that the court examine the statement in its totality in the context in which it was uttered or published.” Id. at 784. It is not unusual to protect false statements of fact where, because of the context, they would have been understood as part of a satire or fiction. In Myers v. Boston Magazine Co., 380 Mass. 336, 403 N.E.2d 376 (1980), a magazine called the plaintiff the “worst” sports announcer in Boston and stated that he was “enrolled in a course for remedial speaking.” Holding that the distinction between opinion and fact is a question of law, the court said the statement, in context, was one of opinion and would reasonably be understood to suggest that the plaintiff should have been enrolled in such a course. 403 N.E.2d at 379. The remarks about plaintiff appeared in a series of categorizations of various people as the best and worst in their fields. As the court noted, the “pervasive mood” was one of “rough humor.” Id., 403 N.E.2d at 377. See Pring v. Penthouse International, Ltd., 695 F.2d 438, 443 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, *1001- U.S.-, 103 S.Ct. 3112, 77 L.Ed.2d 1367 (1983) (in fictional account false statement of facts constitutionally protected “obviously a complete fantasy”).6
I trust I have said enough to demonstrate that in Supreme Court decisions and the decisions of other courts there is no mechanistic rule that requires us to employ hard categories of “opinion” and “fact”— defined by the semantic nature of the individual assertion — in deciding a libel case that touches upon first amendment values.7 *1002We must turn instead to the totality of the circumstances of the case to determine whether a statement may be actionable.
II.
There are several factors that convince me Oilman cannot maintain this action. These considerations are of the type that the Supreme Court and other courts have deemed important: the danger to first amendment freedoms and the functional meaning of the challenged statement as shown by its context and its qualities as recognizable rhetorical hyperbole. The factors here are: Oilman, by his own actions, entered a political arena in which heated discourse was to be expected and must be protected; the “fact” proposed to be tried is in truth wholly unsuitable for trial, which further imperils free discussion; the statement is not of the kind that would usually be accepted as one of hard fact and appeared in a context that further indicated it was rhetorical hyperbole.
A.
Plaintiff Oilman, as will be shown, placed himself in the political arena and became the subject of heated political debate. That fact has significance in two ways. The first, and more conventional, point is that the existence of a political controversy is part of the total context that gives meaning to statements made about Oilman. When we read charges and countercharges about a person in the midst of such controversy we read them as hyperbolic, as part of the combat, and not as factual allegations whose truth we may assume. It will be seen, as the events are recounted, how true that is in Oilman’s case.
My second point is less conventional, though by no means ruled out by case law as a next step in the evolution of doctrine in this troubling field. It is this: in order to protect a vigorous marketplace in political ideas and contentions, we ought to accept the proposition that those who place themselves in a political arena must accept a degree of derogation that others need not. Because this would represent a further development of the law I have argued it more fully than the first point. But it is not necessary to accept this proposition in order to accept the first point, that political controversy is part of the context that tends to show that some apparently factual assertions should be treated as rhetorical hyperbole and hence as opinions.
It is common ground that the core function of the first amendment is the preservation of that freedom to think and speak as one pleases which is the “means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.” Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375, 47 S.Ct. 641, 648, 71 L.Ed. 1095 (1927) (Brandeis, J., concurring). Necessary to the preservation of that freedom, of course, is the willingness of those who would speak to be spoken to and, as in this case, to be spoken about. This is not always a pleasant or painless experience, but it cannot be avoided if the political arena is to remain as vigorous and robust as the first amendment and the nature of our polity require.
In deciding a case like this, therefore, one of the most important considerations is whether the person alleging defamation has in some real sense placed himself in an arena where he should expect to be jostled and bumped in a way that a private person need not expect. Where politics and ideas about politics contend, there is a first amendment arena. The individual who deliberately enters that arena must expect that the debate will sometimes be rough and personal. This would not be true of a political scientist who confined himself to academic pursuits and eschewed political proselytizing. Such a person might legitimately expect that, should columnists for some reason become interested in him, any criticism levelled would stick close to his *1003work, and that, if assertions were made about his reputation, they would be actionable if false.
But Oilman has, as is his undoubted right, gone well beyond the role of the cloistered scholar, and he did so before Evans and Novak wrote about him. As the column recounts, and its literal accuracy in these respects is not challenged, Professor Oilman was an active proponent not just of Marxist scholarship but of Marxist politics. He wrote an article called “On Teaching Marxism and Building the Movement,” which asserted that his classroom was a place where the students’ “bourgeois ideology is being dismantled,” that his endeavor was to “make more revolutionaries,” and that “radical professors” are important to “the movement.” His book approved the “youth rebellion” as helping make possible “a socialist revolution.” Twice he put himself forward for election to the council of the American Political Science Association, campaigning on the promise that, “If elected ... I shall use every means at my disposal to promote the study of Marxism and Marxist approaches to politics throughout the profession.” It was plain that Oilman was a political activist and that he saw his academic post as, among other things, a means of advancing his political goals. This is controversial behavior for an academic, no matter what political creed he espoused, and was bound to raise for debate the question whether he used his position as a teacher to indoctrinate the young with his political beliefs.
It was thus inevitable that when Oilman, who was a political figure, put himself forward as a candidate for the chairmanship of the department of politics and government at the University of Maryland there would be a public political controversy. But more took place, both upon Oilman’s initiative and the initiatives of others, that confirmed his status as a figure in a political arena before the Evans and Novak column appeared.
A hot public controversy erupted the day after Oilman’s nomination for the chairmanship of the department was disclosed. Among the participants in the dispute, which was extensively covered by the news media, were the Republican Acting Governor of Maryland, two members of the university’s board of regents, a state senator, a member of the Prince George’s County council, the associate general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, and the three Democratic candidates for governor.8 Oilman’s nomination thus became an issue in the 1978 Maryland gubernatorial race. The debate about his nomination and politics received nationwide press coverage.
In the midst of this controversy, Oilman announced that he had begun to market a *1004new board game called “Class Struggle,” which he said he had been working on for seven years. He said, “This game will give our people [a] view of how our society works, and for whom.” Players representing workers moved a little hammer around the board; those representing capitalists moved a little top hat. Players moved to the final confrontation — revolution. “ ‘Not a violent overthrow/ Oilman emphasized, ‘but a structural change.’ ” The Washington Post, Apr. 28, 1978. The Evans and Novak column appeared on May 4.
The president of the university rejected Oilman’s appointment, and The Washington Post, in an editorial generally critical of the decision, said: “A teacher’s politics may be his own business, but it becomes a legitimate criterion by which to judge his appointment when it calls into question his classroom intentions. In recent weeks, Mr. Oilman’s public statements have not made his case more appealing. To many, his remarks have suggested that he is in fact more interested in polemics than in political science.” The Washington Post, July 23, 1978, at C 6, col. 1.
The important point about all of this is that Oilman was not simply a scholar who was suddenly singled out by the press or by Evans and Novak. Whatever the merits of his scholarship, he was also a political man who publicly tried to forward his political goals. He had entered the political arena before he put himself forward for the department chairmanship. That candidacy merely widened the area within which he was known and raised for debate a topic of legitimate political concern, a debate which his further actions fueled. That being so, he must accept the banging and jostling of political debate, in ways that a private person need not, in order to keep the political arena free and vital.
Oilman may not be required to accept the same degree of buffeting that a candidate for a major office must, but when he chose to become a spokesman for Marxism to be implemented politically, when he stated that his teaching effectively converted students to Marxism, when he stated that he wanted to spread Marxist approaches to politics throughout a profession of teachers and writers, when he stated that he favored revolution by structural change, when he marketed a game designed to teach the general public about class struggle, and when he stood for an office that would extend his influence over teaching and writing, and hence over the development of the political views of the young— when Professor Oilman chose that path he became a figure in whom the public might legitimately be interested, and about whose intentions and professional status public questions might legitimately be raised. In a word, when he did those things, Oilman entered a first amendment arena and had to accept the rough treatment that arena affords.
The concept of the public, political arena that I have employed has at least some of the same functional characteristics as the concept of a person who is a public figure for limited purposes. That similarity may prompt the objection that the public figure concept applies only to distinguish between negligence and actual malice for purposes of liability. That is, of course, an accurate statement of current doctrine, but I know of no case holding that the concept may not be put to the use proposed, to assist in deciding how much public bumping a person must accept as a risk of the controversies he chooses to engage in.
Two of the dissenting opinions (Wald and Scalia, JJ.) maintain that commentary about public figures is already adequately protected by the actual malice requirement of New York Times v. Sullivan. According to this view, there is no reason to go beyond Sullivan and accord greater first amendment protection to some false political statements made knowingly and with actual malice. But the Supreme Court has already placed the law in precisely the posture to which the dissent objects. Gertz, of course, means that a statement characterized as an opinion cannot be actionable even if made with actual malice and even if it severely damages the person discussed. In such circumstances, society must depend *1005upon the competition of ideas to correct pernicious opinions rather than on “the conscience of judges and juries.”
Bresler and Letter Carriers make the point even clearer. In both, apparent factual assertions — in Bresler that plaintiff engaged in “blackmail”; in Letter Carriers that plaintiffs were “scabs” and “traitors” —were held not actionable because, in context, the reader would take them not as assertions of fact but as vigorous hyperbole. In neither case did the Court inquire about actual malice. It assumed that even if these statements were made with actual malice, they were protected because the context in which they appeared alerted the reader that the statements were not to be read as factual allegations. Thus, the Supreme Court has obviously recognized that the actual malice requirement of Sullivan does not always provide adequate protection and the Court has provided the additional protection that the first amendment requires.
In this respect, I am doing no more than following Supreme Court precedent. As I said at the outset of this subsection, part of the context here is the existence of a vigorous political controversy that Oilman himself fueled and which conditions the way a reader understands the kind of charge that Evans and Novak related.
Judge Wald’s dissent objects that making the distinction between a person who has stepped into the political arena and one who has not is a task too baffling for judges. The answer is that this is exactly the task that judges must perform in deciding whether a person has become a public figure.
But I have suggested, though it is not essential to my result, that the law consider the existence of political controversy and the concept of a political arena in an additional way. That concept could be used to set a kind of de minimis level for rough statements about persons who enter a first amendment arena and become, in essence, public figures for limited purposes. This is a different spectrum from that of the actual malice-negligence distinction but surely one to which the concept of a public figure or a political individual is relevant. Indeed, though the law has not yet had occasion to consider this point, Americans have a kind of common understanding or social usage that runs along these lines. The United States has just been through an intense political campaign. In this highly charged atmosphere, many cruel and damaging things were said about various candidates for major political offices. Some of the statements made may well meet the law’s standards for actual malice — reckless disregard for the truth of the matter asserted. Examples will no doubt spring to mind. Yet if the statement is of the sort that we recognize as rhetorical hyperbole, we would be astonished and highly disapproving if the defamed candidate brought an action for libel. We expect people who engage in controversy to accept that kind of statement as their lot. We think the first amendment demands a hide that tough. As I have said, Oilman may not be required to be as thick-skinned as a candidate for major political office but, as a political man, he shares some of the same responsibility. I do not say that this point alone is sufficient to decide the case, but it weighs, and, I think, weighs heavily, on the side of holding the statement not actionable.
But, in any event, it is indisputable that this swirling public debate provided a strong context in which charges and countercharges should be assessed. In my view, that context made it much less likely that what Evans and Novak said would be regarded as an assertion of plain fact rather than as part of the judgments expressed by each side on the merits of the proposed appointment.
B.
Particularly troubling in a first amendment context is the kind of fact that is proposed for trial and, on either side’s demand, jury determination. Here it is well to recur to one of the functions of the rough division between opinions and facts. It is relatively easy to litigate a false state*1006ment of fact; it may be impossible to prove or disprove an opinion. Courts of law may reasonably limit their dockets to questions which they are competent to resolve. Accordingly, the opinion-fact division serves a purpose by confining the category of actionable statements to those which lend themselves to competent judicial resolution of the truthfulness of their content. Viewed from that juridical perspective, the statement in question here is qualitatively more like an opinion than a fact. It is simply not fit for jury determination.
The evidence is mounting that juries do not give adequate attention to limits imposed by the first amendment and are much more likely than judges to find for the plaintiff in a defamation case. It is appropriate for judges, therefore, to take cases from juries when they are convinced that a statement ought to be protected because, among other reasons, the issue it presents is inherently unsusceptible to accurate resolution by a jury. As the Supreme Court said in Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of United States, Inc., - U.S.-, 104 S.Ct. 1949, 80 L.Ed.2d 502, appellate courts must independently examine the record in first amendment cases to ensure that constitutional values are not endangered. “The requirement of independent appellate review ... reflects a deeply held conviction that judges — and particularly members of [the Supreme] Court — must exercise such review in order to preserve the precious liberties established and ordained by the Constitution.” Id., 104 S.Ct. at 1965. The underlying principle, it seems to me, requires judges to decide when allowing a case to go to a jury would, in the totality of the circumstances, endanger first amendment freedoms. That danger is overwhelming when the issue is of the sort presented here.
The issue the dissents would have tried— the political science academic community’s opinion of Professor Oilman’s stature as a political scientist — is inherently incapable of being adjudicated with any expectation of accuracy. One dissent (Wald, J.) suggests that “[o]ne could, for instance, devise a poll of American Political Science Association members as to their opinion, on a scale of one to ten, of the scholarly value of Oilman’s work. Testimony of prominent political scientists or other measures of reputation would also serve to verify or refute the statement about Oilman’s reputation without sending the jury onto a sea of speculation.” But this suggestion is itself abstract speculation. Some element of realism is necessary in these matters. Let us try to imagine the nature of the trial and what the jury could make of such evidence.
As every presidential campaign reminds us, there is a great spread in the results of public opinion polls, even in the results of polls taken at the same time by a number of reputable and experienced polling organizations. There are scientific and professional disputes about polling methodology, about the representativeness of the sample or of those who respond to the questionnaire, since it is often true that those who respond have markedly different views from those who do not respond. (The problems of sampling, as will be seen, are very much present with a group whose members are as disparate as political scientists.) There are disputes about the phrasing and the order of the questions put, and whether such matters skewed the results. Indeed, if the column’s assertion about his status among academics harmed Oilman’s status among academics, the poll would be seriously biased. (If there was no such harm, of course, Oilman would not have much of a case.) All of these disputes would occur about the poll suggested by the dissent, and would be tried with experts in statistics, psychology, and perhaps other disciplines offering the jury conflicting scientific arguments. Perhaps both the plaintiff and defendants would devise and send out questionnaires so that the jury, weighing scientific arguments about which experts cannot agree, would have to decide which poll was the more methodologically sound. I do not think the results of a trial on issues like these could be anything but random and, whatever we might be willing of necessity to allow in a different kind of *1007trial, I would be utterly unwilling to let first amendment freedoms ride upon an outcome determined by chance.
Let us suppose, however, that the jury chooses one poll as methodologically more acceptable than the other. And let us suppose that the results show that most of the scores awarded Oilman range between 2 and 7, with a scattering of l’s and 10’s, and a mean of 3.5 and a median of 4. What on earth is a jury to make of that? That Oilman has high status?, that he has low status but not “no status”? If low status, is that close enough to “no status” to afford the statement of “no status” protection as permissible hyperbole? It is not at all clear what the term “no status” connotes. The term is so vague as to suggest little more than general, but not necessarily universal, disapproval. Thus, if the profession were sharply divided so that a fifth of those responding ranked Oilman at 8 and the remainder ranked him at 1, would the jury be permitted to find that, in effect, showed “no status” or would it be instructed that any favorable opinion showed “some status” so that the column’s statement was one of false fact?
How is the jury, or an appellate court, to know whether knowledge that the poll was for use in a lawsuit skewed the results? The controversy and this case are widely known, especially among academic political scientists. But the professors who fill out the questionnaires will not be available for examination. Indeed, in order to avoid one kind of bias, they would have to be promised anonymity. How are we to know whether the political stance of the combatants — that Oilman is a Marxist and Evans and Novak are generally regarded as conservatives — skewed the results? Indeed, must not the ideological coloration of the entire political science academic profession become an issue for the jury in evaluating the poll? If that community is conservative, would they rank Oilman lower for purposes of a lawsuit against Evans and Novak than their real estimate of his professional qualities? If that community leans to the left, would its members, for similar political reasons, rank him higher? Would not the investigation into opinions about Oilman necessarily include an investigation of the political opinions of the relevant academic community?
Matters are really worse than this, however. Academic political scientists number in the tens of thousands. With the exception of a few very prominent persons, the quality of no one’s work is known throughout the profession. The profession is fragmented and contains many subsets. Knowledge of a professor’s work is likely to be confined to one or a few such subsets. Thus, political scientists who view themselves as devoted to value-free empirical studies are unlikely to have any informed estimate of the work done by most persons working in political philosophy. More than this, we are not talking about opinions concerning the professional credentials of a faculty member in the school of engineering or medicine, fields in which ideology plays little or no part in estimations of status. We are talking about an academic specialty which, as anyone remotely familiar with it knows, is politically highly charged and riven. Political outlook may color professional estimation. In this field there are varieties of liberals, conservatives, libertarians, Marxists, and Straussians. Suppose, to put a not wholly unreasonable hypothetical, that on the questionnaire the dissent proposes, Oilman received 9’s and 10’s from Marxists and l’s and 2’s from Straussians. It may be doubted that either set of numbers has any significance that a jury should be entitled to consider. If views of professional status are colored or determined by political or philosophical agreement or disagreement, is that the “status” we are interested in? Presumably, if Oilman has been defamed, it is in relation to a more objective, or less political, status. At least, he puts the matter that way. See p. 1010, infra.
The suggestion that reputation could be verified by the testimony of prominent political scientists cures none of this. If prominent political scientists could be induced to testify, and if those who could be induced represented a fair cross-section of the academic community, both heroic as*1008sumptions, the jury would be left with contradictory opinions about opinions. I do not know how the jury could reach any informed judgment unless it were told that any opinion favorable to Oilman meant that the allegation of “no status” was false.
The problem of trying academic reputation to a jury is very similar to the problem a faculty faces when it tries to determine whether to vote to award tenure to a candidate. Judge Winter, himself a veteran of tenure debates, described the situation in Zahorik v. Cornell University, 729 F.2d 85 (2d Cir.1984):
[Tjenure decisions are a source of unusually great disagreement. Because the stakes are high, the number of relevant variables is great and there is no common unit of measure by which to judge scholarship, the dispersion of strongly held views is greater in the case of tenure decisions than with employment decisions generally____ [Arguments pro and con are framed in largely conclusory terms which lend themselves to exaggeration, particularly since the stauncher advocates on each side may anticipate and match an expected escalation of rhetoric by their opponents. Moreover, disagreements as to individuals may reflect long standing and heated disputes as to the merits of contending schools of thought or as to the needs of a particular department____ [A] file composed of irreconcilable evaluations is not unusual.
Id. at 93.
I can testify that this description is accurate, though perhaps understated. The faculty member who has not read the candidate’s publications himself and formed his own judgment is helpless before the impressive, well-documented but diametrically opposed arguments of others. The jury would certainly be in a far worse position to judge.9
Academic reputation, in short, seems to me peculiarly unsuited to a trial at law unless the person in question is one of the few universally acknowledged throughout the profession to be a major figure. Oilman is not claimed to be that. This concern may or may not be weighty enough by itself to deny Oilman access to the jury. I tend to think it may be. But I need not decide that because the points I am making are intended to be cumulative and this point certainly goes to the question of the degree of risk we are willing to impose upon the exercise of political comment.
C.
The statement of “no status” is very unlikely to be read as a flat statement of fact. Rather, it strikes the reader primarily as an exaggerated expression of the anonymous professor’s own view of Oilman’s academic credentials. It is wrong to speak as though there is always a sharp distinction between opinion and fact. There certainly is at the extremes an obvious difference in kind. The assertion that “Jones stole $100 from the church poor box last Friday night,” cannot be tortured into an opinion, just as the assertion that “I *1009think Jones is the kind of man who would steal from the church poor box” is obviously only a statement of the speaker’s opinion of Jones’ character. But the statement that “Half the people in this town think Jones is the kind of man who would steal from the poor box” is not quite like either of the first two. It is less harmful than the first and perhaps more damaging than the second. I say “perhaps” because the assertion of what others think always has a ring of hyperbole about it. The hearer knows that what he is being told is, in fact, one man’s opinion about others’ opinions. It can be called an assertion of fact, which in a sense it is, but it is also the kind of criticism that we are used to hearing and about which we regularly suspend judgment. Told by Smith that Jones actually stole the money, we think that Smith would not dare say such a thing if it were not so. There is a hard quality to the statement: it is capable of proof or disproof and it describes a physical action that did or did not take place. Told by Smith that half the town thinks Jones is the kind of fellow who would steal the money, we instantly discount it as an expression of Smith’s antipathy to Jones. We think it may or may not be so and we realize that there is very little chance of verifying the truth of the assertion as made.
So it is here with the statement that Oilman has no status within the profession of political scientists. It is one man’s impression or opinion relayed by Evans and Novak. The reader does not accept it as a concrete fact. He understands that the speaker thinks poorly of Oilman. He gathers that Oilman is a controversial figure within the profession, which certainly appears to be true. Indeed, the column contains information from which the reader might draw the same conclusion even if Evans and Novak had not made it explicit. Earlier than the passage under discussion, the column stated:
He [Oilman] twice sought election to the council of the American Political Science Association as a candidate of the “Caucus for a New Political Science” and finished last out of 16 candidates each time. Whether or not that represents a professional judgment by his colleagues, as some critics contend, the verdict clearly rejected his campaign pledge: “If elected ... I shall use every means at my disposal to promote the study of Marxism and Marxist approaches to politics throughout the profession.”
The results of these two elections would certainly appear to be a rejection of Oilman’s campaign pledge, and the fact that he made the pledge coupled with the results of the two elections certainly give grounds for supposing that Oilman is an “activist” and that his stature in the profession, or in important segments of the profession, might well be low. Indeed, the column contains accurate quotations from Oilman’s writings that would strongly suggest such an assessment, by some members of the profession, might be likely. I have already rehearsed these in connection with Oilman’s status as a political actor.
This raises the question of what academic reputation or status is. Men and women engaged in academic life are judged by colleagues on various scales of values. That fact might prove troublesome at trial. But Oilman, interestingly enough, advances a quite conventional standard by which status should be judged: “Plaintiff’s occupation is that of scholar and teacher. It is commonly expected that a person in that position will be open-minded and fair-minded, will not attempt to indoctrinate students, and will seek the truth through research and testing and will communicate the results of his search by means of publications which adhere to certain objective canons of scholarship.” Brief for Appellant at 6. If the ideal of the scholar seeking truth dispassionately is the standard, as most lay readers of newspapers undoubtedly believe that it is, then the column’s quotations from his writings and from his electioneering statements, as well as his own public statements about, and the marketing of, his board game, Class Struggle, indicate that he has upon more than one occasion significantly departed from it. Thus, the anonymous professor’s remark *1010that Oilman had “no status” would be taken as a comment upon what the column and the news stories had already revealed.
When we come to the context in which this statement occurred, it becomes even more apparent that few people were likely to perceive it as a direct assertion of fact, to be taken at face value. That context was one of controversy and opinion, and it is known to be such by readers. It is significant, in the first place, that the column appeared on the Op-Ed pages of newspapers. These are pages reserved for the expression of opinion, much of it highly controversial opinion. That does not convert every assertion of fact on the Op-Ed pages into an expression of opinion merely by its placement there. It does alert the reader that he is in the context of controversy and politics, and that what he reads does not even purport to be as balanced, objective, and fair-minded as he has a right to hope to be the case with what is contained in the news columns of the paper. The Op-Ed pages are known to be a forum for controversy, often heated controversy, analogous in many respects to the context of a labor dispute. The latter, of course, was found to impart corrective meaning to the very unpleasant assertions challenged in Letter Carriers.
In this case, moreover, the column was identified as written by Evans and Novak, men who are widely known, and certainly known to readers of the Op-Ed pages, as purveyors of opinion who are frequently controversial. More than this, before the reader comes to the passage in question, he will have discovered many times over that Evans and Novak are, to say the least of it, suspicious of Oilman’s intentions and that they regard him as a remarkably wayward academic. All of that impression is conveyed in language and expressions of opinion that no one on this court finds actionable. By the time the reader comes to the assertion of an anonymous professor’s statement of academic opinion about Oilman, he is, I think, likely to read the remark as more of the same. He is most unlikely to regard that assertion as to be trusted automatically. It is an assertion of a kind of fact, it is true, but a hyperbolic “fact” so thoroughly embedded in opinion and tendentiousness that it takes on their qualities.
It is important to be clear about this. It is the totality of these circumstances that show the statement to be rhetorical hyperbole. If the statement were that a person is known by his friends to be an alcoholic or that a professor’s written works were plagiarized, then it would be a very different kind of factual assertion from that involved here, one taken more seriously by readers, and not mitigated by context.10
I have attempted the kind of contextual inquiry that I think the Supreme Court’s cases indicate and the rationale of the first amendment mandates. I am persuaded that Oilman may not rest a libel action on the statement contained in the Evans and Novak column.

. Lewis makes clear that, unlike some journalists, he is not given to reflexive perceptions of approaching tyranny in every decision that goes against the press; nevertheless he writes:
This is an appropriate time to think again about that great case [New York Times v. Sullivan ]. It is a time of growing libel litigation, of enormous judgments and enormous costs. The press and its lawyers are deeply *997worried; the protection that they thought was won for free expression in New York Times v. Sullivan seems to them to be crumbling. Some would say that libel actions are a more serious threat than ever. Now the American press is addicted to self-pity. Although it is the freest in the world, and freer now than it ever has been, it often cries that doom is at hand. But this time even someone as skeptical of press claims as I am must admit that there is something to the concern.
Id. at 603 (footnote omitted).

. Smolla refers to “a dramatic proliferation of highly publicized libel actions brought by well-known figures who seek, and often receive, staggering sums of money.” Id. at 1. He suggests some interesting reasons why libel litigation has so suddenly been reinvigorated:
I contend that there are four contributing causes to the recent rejuvenation of American libel law____ The first factor is a new legal and cultural seriousness about the inner self. Tort laws has undergone a relaxation of rules that formerly prohibited recovery for purely emotional or psychic injury, a doctrinal evolution that parallels the growth of the “me-generation.” A second factor is the infiltration into the law of defamation of many of the attitudes that have produced a trend in tort law over the past twenty years favoring compensation and risk-spreading goals over fault principles in the selection of liability rules. A third cause of the new era in libel is the increasing difficulty in distinguishing between the informing and entertaining functions of the media. The blurring of this line between entertainment and information has affected the method and substance of communications in important ways and highlights the inadequacies of the current legal standards governing defamation actions. The final factor is doctrinal confusion, caused in large part by a pervasive failure to accommodate constitutional and common law values in a coherent set of standards that is responsive to the realities of modern communications. That doctrinal confusion is particularly telling in an environment where cultural trends, such as a heightened concern for the inner self, and legal trends, such as the trend in tort law in favor of strict liability, both work against the ideals of free expression.
Id. at 11.

. Since most libel plaintiffs demand a jury, as Oilman did, I discuss the problem in the context of jury trials. I doubt the problem would be greatly mitigated if the factfinder were a judge.

. The statement read in full:
“The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab.
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
“When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and Angels weep in Heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out.
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with. Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his Master, he had character enough to hang himself. A scab has not.
“Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commission in the British Army. The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife, his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled promise from his employer.
“Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country; a SCAB is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.”
Letter Carriers, 418 U.S. at 268, 94 S.Ct. at 2773.
The decision in Letter Carriers was not based on the first amendment but rather on the protection that the federal labor laws extend to communications made in the course of a labor dispute. 418 U.S. at 283 n. 15, 94 S.Ct. at 2781 n. 15. Nevertheless, the Court’s interpretation of the labor laws relies heavily on first amendment defamation cases, including Gertz, Id. at 282-86, 94 S.Ct. at 2780-82. It therefore seems correct to regard Letter Carriers as a further explication of those cases.

. The shadings of particular words may be important, too. Though Gertz assumed that “Leninist” and “Communist-fronter" were actionable, in Buckley v. Littell, 539 F.2d 882, 894 (2d Cir.1976), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 1062, 97 S.Ct. 785, 50 L.Ed.2d 777 (1977), it was held that the accusation that William F. Buckley, Jr., is a "fascist" was a constitutionally protected statement of opinion, and in the panel decision in this case, Ollman v. Evans, 713 F.2d 838, 850 (D.C.Cir.), reh. en banc granted, No. 79-2265 (Oct. 6, 1983), the statement that Oilman is a “Marxist" was held a constitutionally protected statement of opinion. In one sense, these statements were as factual as those held actionable in Gertz, but the terms “fascist” and "Marxist" have been so bandied about in debate that their meanings have blurred. We now usually hear those terms as merely blanket denunciations of those with whom the speaker strongly disagrees and who are, respectively, to the right or to the left of him on the political spectrum. They have become equivalent to saying that a person’s political outlook is not respectable. The terms used in Gertz, however, carry the strong flavor that the person so described is subject to Communist Party discipline. That imputation was strongly reinforced by the false allegation that Gertz was an official of an organization that advocated forcible seizure of the government as well as by the context in which these charges were made: a series of articles, of which that on Gertz was one, that claimed there was “a nationwide conspiracy to discredit local law enforcement agencies and create in their stead a national police force capable of supporting a Communist dictatorship.”418 U.S. at 325, 94 S.Ct. at 3000.

. It should be noted that a number of scholars have sharply criticized the utility of the opinion-fact dichotomy both at common law and in various lower court opinions applying Gertz. One respected commentator indicated that ‘‘[n]o task undertaken under the law of defamation is any more elusive than distinguishing between the two.” R. Sack, Libel, Slander, and Related Problems 155 (1980). Another concedes that the opinion-fact distinction has "proved to be a most unsatisfactory and unreliable one, difficult to draw in practice.” W. Prosser, Handbook of the Law of Torts 820 (4th ed. 1971). This view is echoed by Wigmore who finds "no virtue in any test based on the mere verbal or logical distinction between ‘opinion’ and ‘fact.’” 7 J. Wigmore, Evidence § 1919, at 14 (J. Chadbourn rev. ed. 1978). Wigmore goes on to observe:
In the first place no such distinction is scientifically possible____ As soon as we come to analyze and define these terms for the purpose of that accuracy which is necessary in legal rulings, we find that the distinction vanishes____ If then our notion of the supposed firm distinction between "opinion” and "fact” is that the one is certain and sure, the other not, surely a just view of their psychological relations serves to demonstrate that in strict truth nothing is certain. Or if we prefer the sugestión of Sir G.C. Lewis that the test is whether "doubt can reasonably exist,” then certainly it must be perceived that the multiple doubts which ought to exist would exclude vast masses of indubitably admissible testimony. Or if we prefer the idea that "opinion” is inference and fact is "original perception,” then it may be understood that no such distinction can scientifically be made, since the processes of knowledge and the sources of illusion are the same for both.
Id. at 14-16. In sum, the opinion/fact "distinction, without more, primarily furnishes vague familiar terms into which one can pour whatever meaning is desired.” Titus, Statement of Fact Versus Statement of Opinion — A Spurious Dispute in Fair Comment, 15 Vand.L.Rev. 1203 (1962). For an excellent discussion of the deficiencies of the opinion/fact distinction see Franklin & Bussel, The Plaintiff’s Burden in Defamation: Awareness and Falsity, 25 Wm. & Mary L.Rev. 825, 869-85 (1984). This article suggests that a major purpose served by the dichotomy concerns the relative ease of proof of libelous statements. See infra at 983-86.
Scholarly criticism of the opinion/fact distinction is not surprising since even at common law a significant minority of jurisdictions rejected the opinion-fact dichotomy as unworkable and gave more weight to the question whether the public interest in free discussion was implicated. Annot., 110 A.L.R. 412, 435 (1937); Coleman v. MacLennon, 78 Kan. 711, 98 P. 281 (1908); Snively v. Record Publishing Co., 185 Cal. 565, 198 P. 1 (1921). This view was well stated by the Alaska Supreme Court in Pearson v. Fairbanks Publishing Co., 413 P.2d 711 (Alaska 1966):
The distinction between a fact statement and an opinion or comment is so tenuous in most instances, that any attempt to distinguish between the two will lead to needless confusion. The basis for the privilege is that it is in the public interest that there be reasonable freedom of debate and discussion on public issues. One should not be deterred from speaking out through the fear that what he gives as his opinion will be construed by a court as inferring, if not actually amounting to, a misstatement of fact.
Id. at 714 (footnote omitted); see 1 F. Harper & F. James, Torts § 5.28, at 458 (1956). The Pearson court ultimately protected as privileged, unless actual malice were shown, an editorial attack on syndicated columnist Drew Pearson in which it was said that an anonymous colleague of Pearson’s had summed up Pearson’s reputation in Washington by calling him “the garbage man of the fourth estate.” 413 P.2d at 717. The parallel between Pearson’s case and Oilman’s is obvious.

. Justices Rehnquist and White have indicated as much in their dissent from the denial of certiorari in Miskovsky v. Oklahoma Publishing Co., 654 P.2d 587 (Okla.), cert. denied, 459 U.S. 923, 103 S.Ct. 235, 74 L.Ed.2d 186 (1982) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting). In that case, the Justices suggest that the Supreme Court of Oklahoma erred in relying on a rigid opinion/fact dichotomy to determine the truth or falsity of an allegedly libelous statement. 459 U.S. at 924, 103 S.Ct. at 236, citing 654 P.2d at 593. The Justices expressed concern that the Oklahoma court may have misapprehended the reach of the Supreme Court's dicta in Gertz and believed itself bound to apply too rigid a constitutional standard. They favored granting certiorari to make clear that the Gertz dicta should not be applied mechanically given the " ‘rich and complex history’ of the common law’s effort to deal with the question of opinion.” Id., 459 U.S. at 925, 103 S.Ct. at 236.
In Miskovsky, Justices Rehnquist and White appear to have criticized the lower courts’ appli*1002cation of the opinion/fact dichotomy because they believed too much protection was being given to certain statements of .opinion. This case illustrates a different failing of the mechanistic application of the Gertz dichotomy. Here we have a statement of rhetorical hyperbole which is not easily encompassed in rigid categories labelled either “opinion” or “fact."

. The day after the news of Oilman’s nomination appeared in a student newspaper at the university, reporters from the general press asked Maryland’s Acting Governor Blair Lee about the matter at his weekly news conference. According to a story in The Washington Post of April 21, 1978, Lee questioned the wisdom of appointing a Marxist as department head at a public institution. Even before Lee spoke, two members of the university's board of regents had publicly objected to the appointment, and an associate professor who was also a Prince George's County councilman was quoted as saying, "there’s going to be a lot of political reaction and public discussion.” Lee said the legislature might react by attempting to cut the university’s budget and said that one state senator had lodged a formal complaint with him about the nomination.
On April 22, 1978, The Washington Post reported that the associate general secretary of the American Association of University Professors had written to Lee to urge that he stop interfering in Oilman’s nomination, arguing that academic qualifications, not personal ideology, should be dispositive. The following day, April 23, Richard Cohen’s column in The Washington Post took the matter up and argued that the principle of academic freedom required that Oilman’s politics be treated as irrelevant to his nomination. On April 27, a Post story said that three Democratic candidates for governor had criticized Lee for interfering with an academic institution. An aide to one of them was quoted as saying that Oilman was a "golden issue.” The story stated that "Academic freedom and Lee’s right to make such remarks have been debated at Baltimore forums and Montgomery County coffee Matches all this week. The gubernatorial race has found its first real controversy.”

. Judge Scalia suggests there is not much danger to press freedom here since Oilman would have to prove his case by “clear and convincing evidence.” That is next to no protection. If Oilman put three knowledgeable political scientists on the stand to testify that his academic standing was in fact high, and if Evans and Novak put three equally credible witnesses on the stand to testify that Oilman’s reputation was low, I fail to see on what theory the trial judge could take the case from the jury. It is not required that a plaintiff produce more witnesses than the defendants. The situation is the classic battle of the experts and the jury will be free to decide which set it finds "clear and convincing.” For the reasons given in the text, that decision will bear only a coincidental resemblance to the “fact” of Oilman’s real status. Nor is it apparent that Evans and Novak could defeat Oilman’s case, as the dissent asserts, simply by showing that the professor they quote did tell them what they printed. If the professor spoke with knowledge that his assertion was false or with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity, publishing the assertion may well be libellous. It is far from clear that journalists discharge their duty so as to escape legal liability by inquiring of a single source when they should know that others have a different version of the “fact." If the printed statement is treated as a fact, despite its context, there will be precious little protection for it at the trial level.

. The suggestion is made (Scalia, J.) that my position would enable political commentators “to destroy private reputations at will." The distinction just made in the text should disprove that charge. The question is one of meaning in context. But the extravagance of the charge prompts some reflections about its realism as applied to this case. Oilman’s reputation among political scientists is not precisely a "private reputation.” As I have been at some pains to point out, he made his academic intentions and performance a legitimate subject of public controversy. I do not think that the first amendment allows him to have it both ways: acting as a public political man but suing as if he were a private scholar. Moreover, some realism about the world is in order here, too. Among what audience can the assertion that Oilman’s reputation is already low lower his reputation? The general reader forgets his name within days, if not hours, of reading such a column. Academic political scientists who have an opinion of Oilman based on his work are hardly likely to change that opinion because of a quotation from an unnamed professor. Oilman, after all, is not in the position of a physician, an engineer, or a retailer. He does not depend upon public reputation to attract clients or customers. These facts, while they do not of themselves deny Oilman a cause of action, provide some perspective for the claims about the destruction of his private reputation.