A $31 Million Warning to America's Newsrooms
Will the Donald Trump Presidential Library have a George Stephanopoulos Wing, right next to the Qatari Air Force One?
The question isn’t as crazy as it sounds. During the 2024 campaign, Trump sued Stephanopoulos — the former Democratic strategist turned ABC News anchor — for defamation, over his allegation in an on-air interview that Trump had been found liable for rape. (A New York jury found in 2023 that Trump had sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll, but that Carroll had failed to prove that he had raped her under state law. The judge later said that the jury found that Trump had raped her “as many people commonly understand the word,” but not under the “far narrower” legal definition.)
Several legal experts said the case would be an uphill battle for Trump. But, shortly after his reelection, ABC News chose to stop fighting the lawsuit. Instead, they settled, agreeing to post an editor’s note expressing regret for Stephanopoulos’ comments.
Oh, and the network also signed a $15 million check, which went straight to Trump’s library fund.
That concession from a major media organization, early in Trump’s return to power, seems to have emboldened the president, who has been suing (and threatening to sue) over news coverage for decades, but has rarely found as much success doing it as he has in recent months.
Trump now has won a second victory, in another case stemming from coverage of the campaign, this time by CBS News.
In the CBS suit, Trump argued that 60 Minutes dishonestly edited an interview with Kamala Harris to make an answer of hers about Israel sound more cogent. He sued in Texas, under the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits “false, misleading, or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce.”
Even more than in the Stephanopoulos case, experts scoffed at the 60 Minutes lawsuit, questioning whether Trump had standing to bring it in Texas and whether standard journalistic editing of an interview fell under the type of business practices described in the statute.
But, just as in the ABC case, Trump prevailed not because of the legal merits but because the network decided to fold rather than fight. On Tuesday, Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, said that it had reached an agreement with Trump to settle the case. It will pay $16 million, most which will go — you guessed it — to the Trump library.
The president’s legal campaign doesn’t end there.
He has also sued The Des Moines Register and Ann Selzer, the newspaper’s legendary pollster, for erroneously forecasting that Harris would win Iowa last year, also using a consumer protection law. (Trump dropped a federal lawsuit against Selzer this week and re-filed it in state court.) And he threatened CNN and The New York Times with lawsuits last week over their reporting about a preliminary intelligence assessment that contradicted the president’s claims about the impact of the US bombing in Iran.
All of these lawsuits, in their own ways, bring up important conversations about journalistic practices.
George Stephanopoulos should have been more clear about the New York jury’s finding. News organizations could probably be more open about editing interviews in the way 60 Minutes did. Ann Selzer’s polling was clearly flawed. And CNN and the Times could have done more to underline that the intelligence analysis was only the preliminary assessment of a single agency.
Journalists aren’t perfect. All of that is fair game to criticize, and media organizations should be more transparent about these decisions — including on the occasions when they make mistakes.
But going after journalists through lawsuits has a chilling effect on independent media coverage. To take the CNN and Times examples, this reporting — even if it could have included more context, which both outlets provided in follow-up stories — is as traditional as it gets. An intelligence agency made an assessment that was highly relevant to public discourse about a controversial topic. And journalists, through sources, obtained the assessment and shared it with their readers.
No crime was committed: the fact that other intelligence agencies had a different assessment of the situation does not make it any less accurate to report the first agency’s view. We rely on independent media outlets to report this sort of information, even when political leaders don’t want it disclosed. Trump’s threatened lawsuit may ultimately prove unsuccessful (if it is even filed), but similar cases leveled against smaller organizations — which don’t have the resources to fight — could have the effect of intimidating journalists out of reporting information that the public has the right to know.
Trump’s lawsuits, much like the law firms and universities that have been subject to his intimidation tactics, have exposed a split among his targets.
The Times, CNN, and Selzer have all defended their reporting. “No retraction is needed,” Times general counsel David McCraw wrote in a letter to Trump’s lawyers. “No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so.”
ABC and CBS, of course, have chosen differently. They both have their reasons for doing so: ABC may have been afraid of what would have emerged during discovery. (Per The New York Post, Stephanopoulos was repeatedly warned by his producer not to use the word “rape” on air.) Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company, appears to be trying to ease its merger with the company Skydance, a transaction that is subject to review by the Trump administration. (Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr, who has jurisdiction over media mergers, said the 60 Minutes issue is “likely to arise” as part of his examination of the transaction.)
But when media organizations put their corporate interests before their journalists, they risk further undermining trust in their reporting, even when they are theoretically correcting for past mistakes. According to The Wall Street Journal, executives at Paramount were worried that a settlement with Trump could expose them to a separate lawsuit: for bribing a public official, hardly an allegation that would boost a news outlet’s credibility.
The head of CBS News and the top producer of 60 Minutes have both stepped down in recent months because of tensions over Paramount’s decision to negotiate with the president over the lawsuit.
Although some of Trump’s legal actions have taken the novel path of using consumer protections statutes, his white whale in the defamation lawsuits is the overturning of New York Times v. Sullivan, a landmark 1964 Supreme Court precedent that says public officials suing over defamatory statements must prove that the statements were made with “actual malice.”
Trump has previously called for libel laws to be changed, and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have both called for New York Times v. Sullivan to be revisited. The court declined in March to hear a case that could have led to the 1964 precedent being overturned.
Meanwhile, politicians on the Democratic side of the aisle are taking cues from Trump. Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) filed a $787 million lawsuit against Fox News this week, over issues with the network’s claims that he had ducked a phone call from the president. Like Trump, Newsom didn’t just sue the network for defamation. He also cited a California law prohibiting “deceptive and unfair business practices.”
This may be the way of the future — bipartisan attempts to turn journalistic errors into full-blown legal fights, through both defamation and consumer protection laws, and potentially the end of New York Times v. Sullivan.
Or maybe not.
At a panel this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival, media law expert Samantha Barbas said Trump’s legal attacks against reporters are “unprecedented” in US history. But she also noted a silver lining.
Pointing to previous eras when public officials attempted to crack down on media dissent, such as World War I or the McCarthy era, Barbas said that the periods of the fiercest anti-media attacks in US history have often led to the country’s strongest laws protecting press freedom.
“There was no question that democracy was undermined during those periods,” Barbas said. But she added, “I also think there were some unexpected benefits to come out of these free speech crises.” Barbas expressed hope that the US will “emerge” from this period, like those previous ones, “with a stronger, more robust commitment to freedom of speech and a deeper understanding of what free speech should mean.”
When free speech is tested, Barbas said, is when it emerges strongest. It’s when Americans come to realize the fundamental value of free speech: to Democrats, to Republicans, to all of us.
One can only hope.
 | A guest post by
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Let me try a different way to go about this than my normal blunt fashion. Thank you, Gabe, for such an informative piece on the President’s so far successful attempts to exact revenge on certain media outlets and muzzle freedom of the press. Ugh, I can’t. “ … bipartisan attempts to turn journalistic errors into full-blown legal fights, through both defamation and consumer protection laws …” is complete baloney! Where is the analysis about how Fox News, Newsmax, OAN and their ilk completely lie on air every single day? All of their interview editing makes CBS’s Harris interview editing look like nothing. The actual judge in the sexual abuse case called it rape. If it had been Obama or Biden in that trial right wing media would have “rape” plastered everywhere, using the word 24/7. Good for Newsom, finally trying to hold Fox to account for its lies. It’s long overdue. But please don’t use the word bipartisan to describe it or say he’s taking a cue from Trump in going after the media. It’s two entirely different scenarios. What I’d rather see is an informative piece on the rampant lies, misinformation and disinformation being disseminated by right wing media and what can be done about it.
This is such an important thing for people to understand. Thanks Gabe!
Fellow Preamble readers, I highly recommend the podcast “Question Everything” where reporter Brian Reed is rethinking every aspect of being a journalist in this era.
One episode covers how the Sullivan Supreme Court case has had its defenders change their tune over time. We even have audio of Alan Dershowitz explaining a decade ago how much he loves the Sullivan case despite the fact that it meant him a great amount of pain in his personal life, because he believed in the principle of protecting journalism and the truth; that it is more important than protecting someone’s feelings, even when a reporter makes an honest mistake. But now, Dershowitz is attacking Sullivan.
There is a common thread between him and several of the others who are publicly denouncing the case – including Clarence Thomas and Donald Trump. They are powerful men credibly accused of sexual assault. Fascinating. Predictable. I wonder if P. Diddy has any critiques to add.
The whole Question Everything series is really vital to understanding the industry that helps us understand our world, and I cannot recommend it enough. Their 2-part episode “Who’s Behind the Raids? A Mystery in Marion” is maybe the best story about journalism itself that I have ever heard. It’s one of those stories where you are cheering the heroes all along, until you stop and think: if it took so much work and so much luck for justice to prevail, how many of these injustices are happening every day that we never hear about?
The very least we can do in this era is to support journalists who, like Sharon, have come under immense pressure to acquiesce to the powers that attack anyone that hold them accountable. That’s why I was a little disappointed by the reaction in the comments a week or so ago when people thought Elise’s piece about how the American people might be affected by a war in Iran wasn’t sufficiently focused on the human toll of people who live in the Middle East. That is a totally valid critique and I applaud people for speaking out when they find problems with reporting. The disappointing part was the name calling and canceling of subscriptions. We need to support journalists, even the ones that represent a point of view we disagree with. If we strip funding from a news organization just because they offer a POV that contradicts our worldview or taste, we are going to end up much less informed.
In a world where it’s becoming more and more popular to scapegoat and shoot the messenger, we need to be journalists’ cheerleaders if we want any hope of counteracting the intended chilling effect of these frivolous lawsuits.