Trump’s media lawsuits could do serious damage to America’s free press

President-elect Donald Trump’s contempt for the media is well-known, but two lawsuits filed against news organizations offer a worrying look at the next four years for outlets and reporters covering his administration. Disney, the parent company of ABC News, settled a suit with Trump for $15 million; Trump sued the company because anchor George Stephanopoulos mistakenly said Trump was found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, when he was actually found liable for sexual abuse. Trump also sued the Des Moines Register, an Iowa newspaper, this week because they published a poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris would win the state; he also sued the person who produced the poll. Trump is alleging this is election interference. These developments come amid ongoing lawsuits Trump has against CBS and publisher Simon & Schuster. These kinds of lawsuits aren’t new. They’re meant to be expensive and time-consuming for news companies, even if the outlets win the case. They are also meant to make all news organizations question whether it’s worth publishing critical reporting about public figures — in this case, Trump — given the financial, legal, and public relations risk. The US has strong protections for the press, so news groups can fulfill their obligation to inform the public, particularly about powerful people and organizations. But Trump’s lawsuits could interfere with their ability to do so. What are these lawsuits about? Lawsuits such as Trump’s against ABC, the Des Moines Register, and the Iowa pollster Ann Selzer are commonly called strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) suits. The first such suit Trump filed was a defamation case against ABC News. Trump’s team initially filed the suit in Florida in the spring, after Stephanopoulos said in a March interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) on This Week that Trump was found to have raped Carroll in 1996. In fact, the jury in Carroll’s case found in 2023 that Trump’s actions qualified as sexual abuse, and not rape under the law in New York, where the Carroll case was filed. However, the judge in the case did note that Trump’s abuse did align with commonly held definitions of rape, even if they didn’t meet the specific legal standard. Defamation cases against the press must meet a very high standard in the US; reporters make mistakes, but that’s not enough to warrant a lawsuit against a reporter or news organization. Defamation cases must prove a reporter acted with actual malice, writing or saying something they knew or had good reason to believe was false. In July, Disney asked to have the suit dropped, on the grounds that Stephanopoulos’s statements were essentially true, if imprecise, and his reporting was protected by Florida law. The judge argued that a jury could potentially find Stephanopoulos guilty. Then on Friday, she ordered Stephanopoulos and Trump into depositions and for Disney to hand over documents related to the case. Disney reportedly pushed to settle the case in part because the company worried it could lose a jury trial in heavily Republican Florida. In Iowa, Trump is suing the Des Moines Register, its parent company Gannett, Selzer, and her polling company on the grounds that they perpetrated consumer fraud for producing and publishing a pre-election poll that had Vice President Kamala Harris winning the state. (Trump won Iowa by over 10 percentage points.) The lawsuit accuses Selzer of “brazen election interference,” according to the New York Times. Trump filed a similar suit against CBS News in October, alleging that an interview with Harris on its program 60 Minutes violated consumer protection laws due to its editing. SLAPP suits are meant to have a chilling effect The sort of lawsuits Trump is filing against media companies are “the latest workaround that wealthy and powerful people who want to bully the press have found to attempt to circumvent the well-established safeguards for the press under the First Amendment against defamation and similar claims,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Vox. Trump may not win these suits, but that’s not really the point. “What really marks a SLAPP suit, aside from it being legally baseless, is that the intent is not so much to win, but to send a message to bully and punish critics through forcing them to incur legal fees, and not only legal fees, but time costs spent defending against litigation, which can be quite devastating for smaller outlets,” Stern said. Trump has made clear in the past he knows the purpose of these suits — to induce these costs, and to establish fear of speaking out against him. As Trump infamously said about a lawsuit he brought against the author of a book he did not like, “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.” SLAPP suits have a long history in the US, according to Samantha Barbas, a legal historian at the University of Iowa School of Law. “Historically, politicians and other public figures have tried to shut down their critics in the press using defamation law in particular,” she told Vox. “Back in the early 20th century, it was really common for public officials to basically try to sue the press out of existence over comments they didn’t like.” Now, the US has robust press freedom protections, established in the 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan, which codified those protections. Many states also have anti-SLAPP legislation, and a federal anti-SLAPP law was proposed in 2022. But Trump has said he wants to undo some of those safeguards. That those protections exist largely because of Supreme Court precedent rather than due to federal law is reportedly also part of why Disney’s lawyers chose to settle — so the case couldn’t go to the Supreme Court and potentially result in a rollback of Sullivan. “At least one Supreme Court justice, Justice Thomas has expressed skepticism about the New York Times v. Sullivan standard, and would like the Supreme Court to revisit it,” Stern said, although there’s no indication the other justices share Thomas’ opinion. For not, there is nothing stopping Trump from continuing to file SLAPP suits — and he may even inspire copycat cases, Barbas said. “When someone wins a libel suit against the press, it will just inspire others to bring claims, and it becomes very dangerous,” Barbas said.

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Trump’s media lawsuits could do serious damage to America’s free press