From Trump to Newsom, litigious politicians declare open season on news organizations
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Critics of President Trump may have cheered the defamation lawsuit filed by Gov. Gavin Newsom against Fox News for giving the White House a spoonful of its own litigious medicine.
Newsom is suing the conservative-leaning network alleging it intentionally distorted the facts in its reports on the timeline of the governor’s conversations with Trump amid the deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles during immigration raids in the city.
But legal experts are concerned that it may just be the bipartisan escalation of an ongoing trend: use of defamation suits as a political weapon. The tactic, largely used by Trump and his allies until Newsom’s salvo, has put the media business and its legal defenders on high alert.
“There has been an outbreak of defamation lawsuits over the last 10 years since President Trump came on the scene and threatened to open up the libel laws,” said Ted Boutrous, an attorney with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles. “It has been remarkable and has a chilling effect on speech.”
Trump has aggressively used the courts to punish media outlets he believes have crossed him.
Trump extracted $15 million from ABC News after George Stephanopolous said the president was convicted of rape rather than sexual abuse in the civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll.
Trump wanted $20 billion from CBS over because he believed a “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris was deceptively edited to help her presidential campaign.
Although CBS denied Trump’s claims and 1st Amendment experts said the case was frivolous, the network’s parent Paramount Global paid $16 million to settle without an admission of wrongdoing.
Trump is also continuing his lawsuit against the Des Moines Register over a poll that showed him losing Iowa in the 2024 election, moving it to state court Monday after the case appeared to be faltering at the federal level.
Trump hasn’t stopped there.
Last week, he threatened CNN and the New York Times with legal action over their coverage on an early intelligence report that said the military attack on Iran’s nuclear program had set it back only a few months. On Monday, Tom Homan, Trump’s chief advisor on border policy, called for the Department of Justice to investigate CNN for reporting on the existence of an app that alerts users to Immigration and Customs Enforcement activities.
“We have crossed over into a new world,” said Lee Levine, a retired 1st Amendment attorney whose clients included CBS News. “Everybody has taken note and tried to position themselves the best that they can to weather the assault.”
Newsom, a contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, took his shot last week with a suit alleging Fox News intentionally manipulated its coverage of a late-night June 6 phone call he made to Trump. Trump later falsely stated on June 10 that the two were in contact “a day ago,” while Newsom asserted they never spoke after June 6.
Newsom’s lawyers allege in the complaint that by making the call seem more recent, Trump could suggest they discussed the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, which they had not.
Dominion’s motion for a summary judgment reveals what some Fox News execs and anchors were really thinking while giving a voice to Trump’s voter fraud claims.
The governor’s legal team alleged the conservative network’s coverage covered up Trump’s false statement that the two had spoken on June 9 while a banner on the bottom of the screen said, “Gavin Lied About Trump’s Call.”
The suit asks for $787 million — the amount Fox paid Dominion Voting Systems to settle its defamation case over false statements — if Newsom doesn’t get a retraction and on-air apology from host Jesse Watters, who presented the segment on the calls. (Fox News has called the suit a publicity stunt and said it will fight it in court.)
Andrew Geronimo, director of the Dr. Frank Stanton First Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, believes Newsom’s actions are tailored to get the public‘s attention rather than that of the court itself. Newsom has been aggressive in his efforts to combat misinformation disseminated by right wing media outlets, and the lawsuit turned it up a notch.
Experts say high-profile politicians have the ability to get their message out without going to court. “The idea that there is this dollar amount in the millions that they’ve been damaged by the reporting rather than coming out there and account the facts straightforwardly I think is sort of laughable,” Geronimo said.
The calls for possible legal actions against journalists reporting on information leaked by government officials, as is the case in the Iran intelligence stories, is considered a far more troubling development.
The long-term danger is that the suits can ultimately weaken laws that protect press freedoms, such as the ability to publish government information in the public interest.
“With everything the U.S. Supreme Court has been doing lately, all of these press protections could be on the table,” Geronimo said. “Journalists for years have relied on Supreme Court case law that, if someone leaks something to them, they can publish it as long as they did not participate in the illegal collection of it.”
The chilling effect could be particularly acute for large publicly owned media companies that have business before the government. It’s unlikely that CBS parent Paramount Global would settle over “60 Minutes” if it did not have an $8 billion merger deal pending that requires approval of the Federal Communications Commission now led by Trump appointee Brendan Carr.
“The fusion of libel suits and government officials in office is a pernicious development,” Boutrous said. “When you have the president of the United States ... wielding defamation suits when they have some degree of power over those companies that they can assert, that puts the companies in a terrible position.”
It also puts more strain on the legal system. While Trump and Newsom are getting headlines, Boutrous noted there are similar politically motivated defamation cases coming in with “useless claims that we have to litigate.”
“It’s costly for people who are just participating in a public debate,” he said. “We’d rather have less business and more freedom of the press.”
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