The First Amendment "has its fullest and most urgent application precisely to the conduct of campaigns for political office."

TEGNA claims that a failure to do so will result in future defamation suits from aggrieved political candidates across Arkansas who will follow Goodson's lead and sue the press to silence speech harmful to their campaigns.

The principal issue was the question whether Patrick's otherwise privileged comment was made with `actual malice.'Here the parties were in agreement that the applicable rule provided that a public figure was precluded from recovering damages for a defamatory remark about his public conduct, in the absence of proof that the statement was made with actual malice …

Because politicians are intimately involved in the resolution of matters of public concern and because politics occupies a special place within the First Amendment, "[a] nything which might touch on a candidate's fitness for office is a matter of public concern vital to our system of democratic elections."

In the process, we must be mindful that "publications concerning candidates must be accorded at least as much protection under the First and Fourteenth Amendments as those concerning occupants of public office."

—holding that a charge of criminal conduct, no matter how remote in time or place, can never be irrelevant to an official's fitness for office for purposes of the New York Times rule of "knowing falsehood or reckless disregard