Amid his culture war campaign against “woke” liberals, critical race theory and other bugaboos of the political right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken his ongoing culture war to an old, reliable political enemy, the media.

With a defamation bill working its way through the state’s legislature, DeSantis is trying to put some legal teeth in his pitch.

As he is expected to challenge Donald Trump and others for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, the governor is backing a bill in his state’s Republican-dominated legislature to make it much easier for public figures to sue news outlets for defamation — and win.

He gave the world a preview last month with a contrived “roundtable discussion” in a mock television studio livestreamed on social media under the topic “Legacy media defamation practices.”

DeSantis called major media companies “probably the leading purveyors of disinformation in our entire society,” adding, “There needs to be an ability for people to defend themselves.”

Of course, that ability already exists. But that’s not good enough for DeSantis.

The governor has taken on New York Times v. Sullivan, a landmark 1964 Supreme Court case that said public officials could not successfully sue for libel or defamation without proving that the false statements made against them were made with “actual malice,” meaning with knowledge that the statements were false or made with reckless disregard for whether or not they were false.

After the court overruled Roe v. Wade, following a half-century of seemingly settled law, anything can happen.

If the media content in question is wrong, the media deserve to be called out on it.

But DeSantis and Trump are both wrong to imply that “disinformation” only applies to ideas they don’t like and that it only comes from the left.

For example, the hottest newsmaking defamation lawsuit these days involves Fox News and the disclosures pouring out of lawsuits by voting machine companies for its misleading coverage of the 2020 election, including claims that the vote counting might have been rigged.

Worse, evidence shows that some of the channel’s key figures apparently sought to prevent Fox reporters from fact-checking those assertions.

And Fox is not alone among conservative outlets already under a spotlight for truthfulness. Lowering the threshold for defamation lawsuits could be more dangerous for the conservative media ecosystem than it would be for anyone else.

“Disciplined conservatives thinking about 2024 should understand that expanding defamation liability would silence voices across the political spectrum,” Seth Stern, advocacy director for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, recently posted on the group’s website. “It would cause most harm not to mainstream media outlets that can afford lawyers but to independent news outlets and opinionated individuals, including conservatives, who cannot.”

He’s right. This country’s constitutional speech and press freedoms are a model for the rest of the world. That model can be tarnished by government overreach that actually silences the free exchange of ideas, even as it claims to protect them.

Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.