Susan Shelley: Trump holds the media to account

The marquee attraction at the Trump presidential library might be the wall of plaques thanking the donors who built it.

“Paramount, parent company of CBS.” Thank you for the $16 million donation to settle a lawsuit over “60 Minutes” producers editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris in a deceptive manner, making her answers sound better than they really were, right before the election.

“ABC News.” Thank you for the $15 million donation to settle a defamation lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos falsely saying the former president was found liable for “rape.”

And Trump is just getting started.

He’s suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for reporting that he sent a lewd drawing to Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump denies.

He’s suing 19 members of the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation after “independent reviewers” decided in 2022 to uphold the 2018 National Reporting Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the Washington Post and The New York Times for reporting the false story that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.

And now he’s suing The New York Times and Penguin Random House for $15 billion over articles and a book by two reporters, published just weeks before voting began in the 2024 election. The lawsuit alleges these were written with “actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage” on Trump, and published “maliciously” in full knowledge that the articles and the book were “filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications” about him.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said it was a “Great Honor” to sue The New York Times for defamation and libel, calling the paper a “virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party.”

Maybe the Times could sue Trump for saying that. But the discovery would kill them.

The discovery may kill the Pulitzer Prize Board, too, speaking figuratively, of course. The defendants in that lawsuit tried mightily to persuade a court to pause or toss Trump’s complaint, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Trump won some key legal victories and the case moved on to the discovery phase. Trump’s lawyers are set to depose one of the key “independent reviewers,” former Reuters Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler, on Oct. 21.

Trump says he was defamed by the Pulitzer Board’s statement in 2022 saying “two independent reviews” had found that “no passage or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”

Given that the Mueller report and other government investigations found no collusion between Trump and Russia, the then-former president said the Pulitzer Board issued this statement “with knowledge or reckless disregard for its falsity.”

He has a point. And soon he may have another plaque for the donor wall at the presidential library.

One of the Pulitzer Board members, Poynter Institute for Media Studies president Neil Brown, told the court there’s a “real specter of this litigation being used to inflict irreparable harm on the Pulitzer Prizes and on the Defendants.”

What actually inflicts irreparable harm is the refusal to acknowledge that mistakes were made. Renowned investigative journalist Jeff Gerth wrote a lengthy critique of the prize-winning reporting in 2023 for the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review. He pointed out that it was “Clinton and her campaign” that by 2016 “would secretly sponsor and publicly promote an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that there was a secret alliance between Trump and Russia” and that “the media would eventually play a role in all that.”

Gerth wrote that Trump told him, during an interview at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, that in the early weeks of 2017 he was initially hoping to “get along” with the press, but the Russia stories kept coming. “I realized early on I had two jobs,” Trump said, “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”

Trump has been fighting the media for survival ever since. Looking at where he is now, you’d have to say he’s winning. So it’s interesting to view his combativeness against the press not as an extension of a personality trait, but as a targeted political and media strategy for the survival of his brand as well as his political career.

In 2022, Trump filed a $475 million lawsuit against CNN for defamation because they “repeatedly” compared him to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. First Amendment lawyers puzzled over whether Trump was trying to persuade the Supreme Court to revisit the “actual malice” standard in defamation cases involving public figures. Maybe he was. Or maybe it was a grandiose way of telling the public to view CNN’s reporting with a skeptical eye. That’s one way to survive the daily onslaught of “unbelievably fake” stories.

The first lady is similarly combative. Melania Trump sued The Daily Mail over a 2016 article that alleged her modeling agency was an escort service. The case was settled with a reportedly multi-million-dollar payment to Mrs. Trump, a retraction and an apology.

More recently, attorneys for the first lady obtained retractions from HarperCollins UK, publisher of a book about Prince Andrew, and from a former top campaign adviser to Bill Clinton, James Carville, who repeated similar defamatory statements about an “Epstein connection” on his podcast. Carville released a statement saying, “We took down the video and edited out those comments from the episode. I also take back these statements and apologize.”

If Carville can do it, anybody can. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Pulitzer Prize Board should admit they were wrong. If they continue to push false narratives, they may find themselves spending eternity on a donor plaque at the Trump presidential library.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley