TRUMP CAMPAIGN FILES BOGUS LAWSUIT AGAINST THE NEW YORK TIMES

…An appropriate caricature of our president

Trump’s lawsuit unlikely to succeed because US law says newspaper opinions are not facts, and are allowed

Apparently, our US President doesn’t understand that in the United States we have what’s called “Freedom of the press”!

This week, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign said it was filing a libel suit accusing the New York Times of intentionally publishing a false opinion article that suggested Russia and the campaign had a deal going in the 2016 US election.

Most likely, the New York Times has a number of back-up issues to substantiate its article.  But even if it did not have any back-up, they have the right to write an “opinion article” to say whatever they want to say if the author was just reflecting his personal judgement and personal conclusions. 

This country has over 200 years of a tradition of writing opinions about US candidates running for office.

In Trump’s latest escalation of his long-running battle with the news media, his campaign officials said the lawsuit was being filed in state court in New York, so it’s not a federal suit.

Separately, Trump also went after two other news organizations that he frequently criticizes.  Of course, it was the cable TV news channels CNN and MSNBC, accusing them of presenting the danger from the coronavirus in as bad a light as possible and upsetting financial markets.  Never mind that Trump is more concerned by the virus effect on the stock market, than he is on its effect to the American public.

It's as if those two networks could actually cause the stock markets to drop a 1,000 points in one day.  Don’t you think that hearing from every major newspaper and every network that every major country on the globe was having outbreaks of the Coronavirus, that would be the reason for the stock market to panic?

A Trump campaign statement said that the aim of the suit against the Times, the most prominent American news organization, was to hold the newspaper “accountable for intentionally publishing false statements against President Trump’s campaign.”

My goodness!  It's an opinion article, not a hard-news statement of fact!

The statements were not “false” statements, but they were serious statements.  The reason for the lawsuit is that the economy and the stock market are the number one items that Trump is going to run on for his 2020 election campaign.  If this Coronavirus thing continues to effect the closing of borders and more travel bans, the stock market is going to continue to plummet, and it will stick there until the medical industry can get a handle on the virus.  They are already saying that it will be at least a year before a vaccination can be developed, manufactured, tested and distributed.  That takes us past the 2020 election.

This unrealistic lawsuit relates back to a March 27, 2019, opinion article written by Max Frankel.  This man was the executive editor of the Times from 1986 to 1994.

A draft copy of the suit, attached to a campaign news release, accused the newspaper of “extreme bias against, and animosity toward the campaign,” and cited what it called the Times’ “exuberance to improperly influence the presidential election in November 2020.”  

In a response statement, a New York Times spokesperson said: “The Trump Campaign has turned to the courts to try to punish an opinion writer for having an opinion they find unacceptable. Fortunately, the law protects the right of Americans to express their judgments and conclusions, especially about events of public importance. We look forward to vindicating that right in this case.

The newspaper’s spokesperson said it has yet to be served with the suit and they only learned about it through media reports.

Trump’s criticism is what he calls the, ”liberal bias in the US news media.”

This plays well with his conservative political base and it often generates applause at his noisy political rallies where his supporters often jeer all journalists. Trump often falsely refers to various news media outlets as “fake news” and he has lied by calling elements of the US news media “the enemy of the American people.”

The New York Times was involved in a landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling that has served as a safeguard for media reporting on public figures. In the case New York Times v. Sullivan, the court decided that the US Constitution’s First Amendment protection for freedom of the press allows even statements that are false to be published as long as the publication was not done with “actual malice.”

This latest suit, according to the draft copy released by the campaign, it accused the newspaper of a “malicious motive” and “reckless disregard for the truth.”

Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, said the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed because US defamation law does not allow liability for a sincerely held belief about a public figure, like Trump.  He said judges would be skeptical of the claims and inclined to dismiss them.

“They’re going to be very concerned with the First Amendment implications of allowing a case like this to move forward,” Zipursky said.

Copyright G. Ater 2020