Trump escalates fight against press with libel lawsuits – By Justin Wise (The Hill) / March 8 2020
The Trump campaign’s libel lawsuits against The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN mark a dramatic escalation in the president’s long fight with the media.
Legal experts have said the suits are dead on arrival, failing to meet the high bar to prove defamation of a public figure, but they fear an environment in which powerful elected officials like Trump try to use the courts to intimidate the press.
“The concern here is not that one of these suits would win on the merits — it’s the chilling effect that it has on public discussion of political affairs,” Jonathan Peters, the Columbia Journalism Review’s press freedom correspondent and a University of Georgia media law professor, told The Hill.
Trump has regularly attacked the press, often referring to reporters as the “enemy of the people,” but the latest lawsuits, targeting an op-ed from The Times, one from CNN, and two separate opinion columns in The Post, mark the first time he has sued news organizations as president. After filing the complaint against The Times, Trump warned that more were “coming.”
The lawsuits, filed in consecutive weeks, allege that the outlets knowingly published false information about the president in opinion pieces that touched on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., against The Post cites a June 2019 piece from Post opinion writer Paul Waldman.
“The 2020 election will obviously be distinct in all kinds of ways we can’t yet anticipate,” Waldman wrote. “For instance, who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?” In the sentence, Waldman linked to an ABC interview in which Trump suggested he would accept potentially damaging information from a foreign government about a political opponent.
The campaign argues that statement was “defamatory” because no Trump associate has made a statement inviting assistance from Russia or North Korea.
The campaign also takes issue with an opinion article that said the Russia probe found Trump’s team “tried to conspire with, and happily profited off” Moscow’s efforts.
Continue to article: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/486273-trump-escalates-fight-against-press-with-libel-lawsuits
