I regret to inform you that former President Donald Trump has once again filed what is almost inarguably a SLAPP complaint, this time against CBS for editing its own interview of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s lawsuit, first reported by Fox News yesterday, escalates a weeks-long crusade against CBS for its 60 Minutes interview with Harris. Trump argues CBS — which published multiple cuts of the interview — deceptively edited Harris’ answer to make her appear more coherent. This is the kind of editing decision it’s reasonable to argue about, and that people in fact constantly argue about with Trump’s own words. It is less reasonable to:
All of which Trump has now done.
It would be a waste of your time and mine to parse the legal particulars here. Trump invokes the FCC’s broadcast news distortion rule, which allows the agency to investigate a station that “deliberately distorted” or falsified a “factual news report.” (I might as well note this whole saga began because CBS voluntarily published the content Trump claims it was suppressing, just not in a specific edit.) This policy has been described as “largely symbolic.”
The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas, a state where neither CBS nor Trump are located. The justification is that the interview aired in and “has been viewed by individuals in Texas,” alongside… basically everywhere else in the country. It’s more pertinent to note that this district is home to Trump-friendly judges with no compunctions about accepting absolutely absurd legal arguments from conservative plaintiffs. In other words, it’s blatant forum-shopping.
Lawsuits are one of Trump’s favorite ways to deal with news he dislikes. Last year he tried to wring $475 million out of CNN for using the phrase “the big lie” to describe his repeated election denial, before being unceremoniously shut down by a judge. He was ordered to pay The New York Times’ legal fees for a similar, equally baseless suit. So far judges have correctly recognized these suits as specious, but that’s reliant on a legal system that’s not rebuilt by Trump from the ground up, and it’s still shameless, expensive harassment of the press.
To paraphrase a now-famous description of Trump, there is no reason to take this lawsuit literally. If anyone involved here believed a word of their claims about enforcing impartial news coverage, they’d be supporting a legal standard that would wipe their favorite conservative TV networks off the map. (And let’s be clear: this standard, regardless of what anyone at The Verge thinks of these networks, would be bad.)
There’s every reason to take this lawsuit seriously. It’s the latest in a long string of signals that Trump opposes legal protections for any news coverage he disapproves of. Would-be future Trump apparatchik Elon Musk supports effectively forcing TV stations off the airwaves to repurpose their spectrum. Broadcast TV is somehow a speech battleground again in 2024. For anyone who opposes the government looking over interviewers’ shoulders, the only consolation is that Trump merely wields the power of poorly conceived legal action — for now.