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Donald Trump said he plans to sue a newspaper over an election poll he didn’t like.
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It joins a wave of recent threats – and lawsuits – Trump has filed against the media.
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That could create a landscape where publishers will have to be extra careful about what they say.
A pretty good journalistic rule of thumb: someone threatening to sue someone is not news.
Literally anyone can do that participation they’re going to sue someone for whatever reason. But a lot of people who say they’re going to sue someone don’t. So the argument goes that you should wait until they actually file charges before reporting on it.
Then there is Donald Trump. He also constantly threatens to sue people – especially the press. But sometimes he follows through with the threat. From next month he will again become the most powerful person in the world.
So. When Trump announces he will sue journalists and news organizations — as he did Monday, when he suggested he would sue pollster Ann Selzer, or The Des Moines Register, or both, for publishing a poll showing he lost Iowa in the 2024 elections – should we take him seriously?
I think so.
That’s partly because Trump, who has a long career of threatening media organizations, appears to be ramping up his legal energy. Over the weekend, he demanded a $15 million settlement from ABC News over a March interview with George Stephanopoulos that Trump said was defamatory. He has also filed suit against CBS over the show’s “60 Minutes” handling of an interview with Kamala Harris, claiming the network is guilty of election interference.
Many legal experts think Trump has no chance of beating CBS in court — “The First Amendment is designed to protect the press from such lawsuits,” attorney Floyd Abrams told CNN this fall. But that same cohort didn’t think much about Trump’s chances against ABC.
Just as important: the threats Trump is making, along with threats from others close to him, such as Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, who has vowed to “go after the people in the media who have lied about U.S. citizens who helped Joe Biden cheat the presidential election” – seems like a strategy.
As David Enrich of The New York Times notes, these lawsuits and threatened lawsuits appear to be the “latest sign that the new Trump administration appears ready to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage.”
It’s true that the First Amendment makes it difficult to win lawsuits against journalists and anyone else in the United States because of what they say or write. Especially if the person filing the charges is a public figure. And Donald Trump is perhaps the most public figure there is.
But fighting lawsuits – even those without much chance of winning – can be very expensive. (For its part, The Des Moines Register’s parent company has said a lawsuit would be baseless.) And while it is possible for publishers who win lawsuits brought against them by Trump to charge him their legal fees — as The New York Times has done this successfully for years – you still have to have the money and willpower for the fight.
Perhaps just as importantly, it’s one thing to fight Donald Trump in court when he’s a private citizen. It’s another thing entirely when he’s the President of the United States and can make life difficult for you or your company regardless of what happens in court.
This is all something you need to think about now if you are going into journalism. Not just when Trump, or someone close to him, complains about your reporting – but before you publish or broadcast it. That seems to be what Trump would like.
So yes. That’s a story.
Read the original article on Business Insider
