For many there is no more cherished right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution than the freedom of speech and, of course, its accompanying freedom of the press.
During the November election cycle, various people like billionaire Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan spoke of the importance of free speech. Both cited part of their reasoning for supporting Donald Trump was his commitment to free speech.
Those and many other self-professed free speech proponents are noticeably quiet as Trump works to curtail freedom of speech to a degree that perhaps has never been seen in this country.
Trump, as part of a broad legal attack on the American press, is suing the Des Moines Register because the newspaper published a poll showing he was trailing Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris a few days before the November election. The president-elect also is suing longtime pollster Ann Selzer, whose poll the newspaper published. Granted, the Selzer poll of Iowa voters was way off, but because a poll is wrong has never been viewed as a reason to sue a news outlet that chooses to run it.
And ABC, one of the nation’s legacy broadcast networks, has already settled with Trump another lawsuit that many believe the network eventually would have won.
Historians and journalism advocates view Trump’s Des Moines Register lawsuit, ABC lawsuit and others as an effort to curtail press freedom. The lawsuits, they argue, create a fear of reporting on powerful people with deep pockets, and they force news outlets to expend large sums of money to defend lawsuits that have in many cases been viewed as frivolous.
A deeper expressed fear is that the Trump lawsuits are designed to convince a U.S. Supreme Court loaded with Trump sympathizers to curtail the press freedoms that this country has long enjoyed.
It is important to remember that at one time in the nation’s history, newspapers were largely extensions of the political parties and particular politicians — something that is no longer the case for most mainstream or legacy media outlets.
The late James Baughman, the late mass communications historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a 2011 Center for Journalism Ethics speech, “Papers in opposition to Andrew Jackson in 1828 attacked him for marrying a woman before her divorce had been finalized. He was the violator of marital virtue, a seducer. Jackson, one paper declared, ‘tore from a husband the wife of his bosom.’ Pro-Jackson newspapers insisted on the general’s innocence and accused his critics of violating his privacy. There was no objective, middle ground.”
Baughman pointed out that in 1884, the Los Angeles Times did not like that Democrat Grover Cleveland had won the presidency, so the paper “simply failed to report this unhappy result for several days.”
The history of American media, however, may mean little to Trump. He is suing the Pulitzer Prize committee for reaffirming the coveted award to The New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting of Trump’s campaign ties with Russia during the 2016 campaign. He is also suing CBS and its news show 60 Minutes for how an interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was edited.
There are, of course, countless examples of Fox News and other Trump-friendly television networks editing clips of interviews or news segments in ways that could be seen as favorable to Trump. Fox has said simply the edits were made for the sake of brevity. Advocates of press freedom would argue the practice is Fox’s guaranteed legal right, though they may disagree with the conservative outlets’ decisions in terms of journalism ethics.
Fox did pay a record $787 million to Dominion, a voting machine manufacturer, because of allegations aired on the network that their machines changed votes to favor Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The lawsuit was based on financial harm incurred by Dominion as a result of the false reports.
Many of those allegations were made not by Fox employees, but by Trump supporters who were network guests. Emails obtained during the lawsuit reveal that the Fox staff did not believe the unfounded allegations but repeatedly allowed the Trump allies to make them.
The so-called legacy media, including Fox in this instance, have long been legally responsible for what other people say on their news outlets. A newspaper, for instance, can be held liable for making false claims about a person in a letter to the editor it publishes.
Free speech, of course, does not mean people or news outlets cannot face consequences for what they say. A company could choose to fire an employee for offensive speech, and outlets are certainly not obligated to publish what they view as offensive or false claims.
But this latest barrage of lawsuits from Trump, that so-called advocate of free speech, have many experts questioning how far the long-held American free speech principles could be stretched.
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