Comm Law and Ethics 400

Alex Jones (Wikipedia).

Alex Jones is bankrupt. The host and owner of  the far-right fake news conspiracy-peddling website “Infowars.com” owed $1.5 billion dollars by the end of 2022 to people harmed by his lies about  the massacre at an elementary school in Sandy Hook CT a decade beforehand.

The cascade of losses in libel suits began with a Texas jury’s Aug. 5, 2022 decision to award  $50 million in actual and punitive damages to parents of the massacre’s victims. Four more libel suits  in Texas and Connecticut also ended with guilty verdicts and heavy fines.

Jones’ lies about Sandy Hook began within hours of the massacre, and were frequently  repeated since then. He falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre of 2012 was a hoax and  that the parents of the children killed  at the school were “crisis actors.”  As a result, Sandy Hook parents were subjected to harassment and other damages, on top of the profound grief of losing their children. One family has had to move 10 times to avoid Jones’ followers.

Jones’ attorneys argued that the First Amendment protects his right to make mistakes and that other people, not Jones, were to blame for the harassment.

But it’s too late for that argument. Jones already lost the first Texas libel suit by refusing to cooperate with the court, and default judgments were issued.  The only question in the Texas case and others involves the amount of damages.  Continue reading →

The last time a sitting president sued a newspaper for libel, laughter broke out on the floor of the US Senate.

That was December 15, 1908, when president Teddy Roosevelt sued the  New York World  newspaper after it linked him to corruption over the Panama Canal. Roosevelt ordered federal attorneys to file criminal libel suits against newspapers  all over the country. Democrats were outraged, once they stopped laughing.  One US attorney resigned in protest rather than prosecute Teddy’s critics for libel.

The main target of the suits, New York World newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, famously said:  “He cannot muzzle the World.”  (See Pulitzer’s Reply Dec. 16, 1908)

Roosevelt’s lawsuit,  US v Press Publishing,  used to be considered the “last gasp” of seditious libel.

The US Supreme Court didn’t think much of the suit, handing down a ruling  in 1911 that was only two pages long. The ruling ignored the merits of the case and simply sustained an objection by Press Publishing (the owner of the NY World)  that “the court has no jurisdiction in this case, because there is no statute of the United States authorizing the prosecution.”

The case was thought to be a First Amendment landmark at the time, but it is barely remembered in communications law textbooks today.  After all, what sitting president would lower himself to file such a suit?  Even outright allegations of murder did not tempt President Bill Clinton to wield that cudgel against critics like Jerry Falwell. What president would be so foolish as to sue for libel just because a newspaper published a disagreeable opinion?

Which brings us to Donald Trump, the president who defied expectations. Tump  sued the New York Times  on Feb. 26, 2020, and the Washington Post, on March  3, 2020, for  an apparently disagreeable opinion about Trump’s relationship with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. In the suit, Trump claimed that the Times knowingly published the supposedly false charge that there was a “quid pro quo” with the Russians in return for  their help in the 2016 election.  (The plaintiff’s petition can be read here.) 

This “quid pro quo” was described in  an op-ed written by former New York Times editor Max Frankel and published March 27, 2019.  In the op-ed, Frankel rejected  small concerns about “collusion” with Russia in the Trump campaign. The much larger issue, he said, involved the relationship between Trump and Putin.

(UPDATE: The story continues but the court dismissed Trump’s lawsuit in March, 2021).
Continue reading →