Dec.19

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Legal Matters, Part I: Time for a Media Defense Fund?

At this point, everyone is in on the secret that Donald Trump has discovered, and exploited: Most major news outlets are minor, and not very profitable, elements of vast corporate portfolios. The tycoons/corporate boards that manage these news operations might be willing to do a public service, but they are not willing to put their corporate bottom lines in jeopardy.

Consider this list of, arguably, the ten most important outlets for news (especially political news):

It's not a pretty picture. You have six news concerns that are part of corporate behemoths with a value of $90 billion or more, and a seventh (The Los Angeles Times) owned by a man who has clearly shown he will kowtow to Trump as much as is necessary. Two more news concerns (Fox, The Wall Street Journal) are in the business of promoting Trump and Trumpism. That means that the best hope, among the big-time media outlets, is The New York Times. And everyone knows about the many and varied concerns the Times' coverage has raised over the past decade.

This leaves smaller concerns—podcasters, small-to-medium newspapers, blogs, writers on Substack/beehiiv/etc.—to carry the banner, and to make sure that democracy does not die in darkness. Trump thinks he's cracked this riddle, too. As everyone knows by now, he's dusted off an oldie but a goodie from his bag of tricks, and filed a nuisance lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and Ann Selzer. His thinking is that he can afford to blow a few million on legal fees, and his opponents can't, so he'll beat them into submission.

We are not exactly sure that Trump will be able to pull off what he's trying to pull off here. That is to say, his lawsuit is so obviously without merit, and is so clearly an abuse of process, that we would think Selzer/the Register would be able to win on summary judgment. Even if Trump could prove that the last Selzer poll was deliberately falsified (which he cannot do, since it was not), his argument for damages is ridiculous. If the Trump campaign actually spent extra money in Iowa because they feared losing, that's on them. They could have (and presumably did) run their own polls, and they could have (and presumably did) look at non-Selzer polls of Iowa.

Maybe we are wrong about how easily (and thus, how cheaply) Selzer/the Register will win. Even if we are not, Trump and his lawyers are not going to stop with just one nuisance suit. And the next time, or maybe the time after that, or maybe the time after that, they are going to find a cause of action that is not so easily dismissed. And the unlucky person named as defendant in that suit is going to have big-time legal bills, even if they are in the right.

Consequently, there are currently preliminary rumblings about the formation of some sort of consortium in which various small and medium media outlets would pool funds, for any member who is sued to draw upon. The basic argument is that any person or outlet unlucky enough to end up with a target on their backs isn't just fighting for themselves, but instead for the whole media establishment.

We shall see if anything comes of this; at the moment, there isn't even a formal fundraising effort for Selzer/the Register, much less "all political media." That said, there is obviously some merit in the notion, and similar arrangements have been made for investigative reporters. And while it's not our money, this also seems like the sort of thing that maybe a Jeff Bezos or a Patrick Soon-Shiong ought to support, perhaps via a shell corporation. Failing that, maybe one of the left-leaning, non-media billionaires might ride to the rescue; a $100 million endowment is a relative pittance for Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or Mackenzie Scott. (Z)