Media lawyers scoffed last year when President Trump sued two news organizations for producing journalism that, he claimed, violated laws meant to protect consumers from things like deceptive advertising.
They’re not laughing anymore.
First Amendment experts still believe that Mr. Trump’s cases, against CBS News and The Des Moines Register, lack legal merit. But they now also realize that the lawsuits are proving effective at harassing the press — and that more of them are probably on the way.
The focus of the experts’ concern is the decision within Paramount, CBS’s parent company, to try to settle one of those lawsuits, showing that even a far-fetched legal argument can yield results. CBS would be the second major media company to recently reach a settlement with Mr. Trump, after ABC paid $16 million to resolve a defamation suit in December.
The settlement talks between Paramount and Mr. Trump are likely to encourage the president, his allies and others to continue deploying the new strategy of suing media companies under consumer protection laws, said Adam Steinbaugh, a lawyer representing a defendant in The Des Moines Register suit.
“What gets rewarded gets repeated,” said Mr. Steinbaugh, who works for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Daniel Suhr, the president of the Center for American Rights, a conservative legal group that has filed a similar lawsuit against The Register, said the goal of the consumer protection cases was partly to send a warning to other news outlets.
“We want to create a precedent that news media organizations take seriously that they need to be responsible in how they do their jobs,” Mr. Suhr said.
The lawsuits are part of a broader campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to attack major news organizations. This week, the president and his close ally Elon Musk falsely accused media outlets, including The New York Times, of being government-financed organs of the state. (Some government agencies purchase subscriptions to the publications.) Some of Mr. Trump’s nominees for top administration jobs, as well as Mr. Musk, have threatened to sue media companies for critical articles. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating outlets including NPR and PBS.
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against CBS, filed in Texas in October, accuses the broadcaster of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Trump followed that up with the lawsuit in December against The Register and J. Ann Selzer, a pollster, over a survey that showed Ms. Harris leading Mr. Trump in the presidential race in Iowa. He won the state days later by 13 percentage points.
Both lawsuits argue that the news outlets deliberately hoodwinked the public, in violation of state consumer protection laws. The defendants in both cases have denied wrongdoing, saying they followed normal editorial practices, and are seeking to have the suits dismissed.
During his decades in the spotlight, Mr. Trump has been a serial litigant against news outlets. Until now, his preferred strategy was to sue for defamation. But such lawsuits are hard to win — Mr. Trump has almost always lost — in part because of longstanding Supreme Court precedents that protect news organizations’ First Amendment rights to aggressively cover public figures.
Using state consumer protection laws to punish the media offers an alternate line of attack.
One early attempt came in 1983, when an investor in Ohio sued the owner of The Wall Street Journal for publishing inaccurate information about a corporate bond; the state Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. In 2020, a nonprofit group sued Fox News for spreading misinformation about Covid-19; a judge in Washington State threw out that suit, saying its claim that news coverage violated consumer-protection laws “runs afoul of the protections of the First Amendment.”
Still, the idea has been gaining popularity among conservatives.
An initial volley was fired in 2019. Charles Harder, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, wrote a letter to CNN threatening to sue the network for misrepresenting itself as a source of ethical news journalism, when in fact it was pursuing a vendetta against the president. Mr. Harder claimed that this violated the federal Lanham Act, which prohibits false advertising. The threatened lawsuit never materialized.
Four years later, Media Matters for America, a liberal group, reported that advertisements for major companies were running on Twitter alongside extremist content. Mr. Musk, who had recently purchased the social media platform now known as X, accused Media Matters of manipulating data to reach its conclusions.
In response, Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, opened an investigation into whether the article by Media Matters violated the state’s deceptive trade practices law. Missouri’s Republican attorney general followed suit with a similar investigation, citing his state’s consumer protection law.
The investigations don’t appear to have yielded results, in part because Media Matters, which denied wrongdoing, went to court to block the attorneys general from forcing the group to hand over its internal records. A federal judge found that the investigations had a “chilling effect” on Media Matters’ free speech rights.
But the back-to-back actions by the attorneys general caught the attention of lawyers for Mr. Trump and other conservative groups, who took similar tacks.
“I think this is a trend, and it is obviously very troubling,” said Aria C. Branch, a partner at Elias Law Group who is representing Media Matters.
Days before the presidential election, Edward Paltzik, a lawyer with a small New York law firm, sued CBS on Mr. Trump’s behalf in federal court in Amarillo, Texas. The suit argued that CBS “doctored” its interview with Ms. Harris to present her in a positive light, violating a state law against “false, misleading or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce.” It sought $10 billion in damages.
There was no evidence in the complaint that CBS edited the interview in a manipulative fashion, instead of for clarity or brevity. There was no evidence that the interview misled viewers or damaged Mr. Trump. And it was unclear what legal standing Mr. Trump had to bring a lawsuit in Texas, where he does not live and which was not the site of the interview.
But filing the suit in Amarillo meant it would be heard by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee who has been hospitable to conservative lawsuits that many lawyers regard as meritless.
About six weeks later, in December, Mr. Paltzik filed the suit against The Des Moines Register and Ms. Selzer in state court in Iowa, claiming that Ms. Selzer’s poll had been warped to harm Mr. Trump. The suit did not present evidence that the poll was deliberately skewed, that Mr. Trump had been hurt or that he had standing to file a lawsuit in Iowa.
Last month, the Center for American Rights, the conservative legal group, filed its own complaint against The Register and Ms. Selzer on behalf of a subscriber to the newspaper. This suit used the same Iowa law to argue that the poll had deliberately misled The Register’s paying subscribers.
Mr. Suhr of the Center for American Rights described state consumer protection laws as a promising if largely untested vehicle for pursuing media outlets. “It’s a new twist,” he said. Would the Register lawsuit serve as a model for future complaints? “The answer is yes,” he said. “We plan to remain vigilant on behalf of the American people.”
Mr. Steinbaugh, who is representing Ms. Selzer in the suits filed by Mr. Trump and the Register subscriber, described the litigation as an attempt to intimidate media outlets.
“There is an American tradition of officials trying to punish political speech and news coverage,” he said, “and this is just another iteration of that.”
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