President Donald Trump is using the courts to punish media outlets for publishing stories he doesn’t like.
The latest example is a $10 billion lawsuit filed in federal court in Miami against the Wall Street Journal and its owners, including Rupert Murdoch, for publishing a story that described a sexually suggestive birthday card Trump allegedly sent to the late Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.
Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the press. Even before taking office for his first term, he began dismissing the mainstream media as “fake news,” and soon after assuming office he tweeted that the “FAKE NEWS media” is “the enemy of the American people.”
Trump has since used the courts to muzzle his critics, filing lawsuits that target media companies like CBS and ABC. Those companies have chosen to settle rather than fight, as have tech companies like Meta and X.
In his second term, Trump has also punished other outlets he dislikes, including Voice of America, the Associated Press, NPR and PBS, and Politico.
Trump also cheered the cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, a frequent critic of the Trump administration, though the network emphasized that it was “purely a financial decision.”
CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, was granted regulatory approval on Thursday to merge with Skydance Media, and some have speculated that Colbert’s cancellation was partly meant to placate Trump and spur the Federal Communications Commission to move the deal along.
Today, Explained host Noel King spoke with David Folkenflik, NPR’s longtime media correspondent and author of Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires about the Wall Street Journal owner and Trump’s latest salvo in his war on his media critics.
The president is suing the Wall Street Journal and he’s suing Rupert Murdoch. What happened?
There’s what happened immediately and what’s happened in the bigger picture. What’s happened immediately is wild. Trump has been under duress from his own MAGA base over the failure of his administration to deliver on their promise to release the so-called Epstein Files that Attorney General Pam Bondi said back in February was on her desk and that she was reviewing. This past week, Trump said, It’s not a story. Why is everybody paying attention to it?
Then, the Wall Street Journal broke a story that did not show any criminal wrongdoing by Trump, but it certainly shows a coziness between Trump and perhaps the most notorious convicted sex offender in the nation’s recent history, Jeffrey Epstein, by relaying a description of an obscene doodle and a note that the president is said to have sent two decades ago on the occasion of Epstein’s 50th birthday. The birthday note essentially implied that the day would be a great day for him, with perhaps some sexual conquest, although he doesn’t quite say it explicitly.
Trump then posted that he had told Rupert Murdoch this wasn’t true. The president’s press secretary said much the same publicly. And Trump delivered on his promise. He’s suing the Wall Street Journal. He’s suing Rupert Murdoch, which is an extraordinary turn of affairs for these two titanic figures on the American landscape who have been allied for a decade and now are, at least legally, at loggerheads.
You wrote a very well-regarded book about Rupert Murdoch. Let me ask you something on behalf of the skeptics. Donald Trump says that birthday letter is not real. Could it ever be true that the Wall Street Journal would claim this exists if it doesn’t?
I want to remain agnostic. We have not seen a replica of the doodle or the note itself, and that’s something a lot of people are looking for. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal has a decades-long tradition — preceding Rupert Murdoch, but including the proprietorship and owner of Rupert Murdoch since he bought the paper in 2007 — of doing incredible work and having amazing lawyers. And amazing lawyers do two things: They can fight ferociously in court, but they also review things (from what’s been described to me by editors and reporters I’ve talked to over the years) with a very careful degree of scrutiny.
I don’t think you publish something like this without feeling that you are confident that this is accurate and fair.
Do you have any insight into why the Wall Street Journal wouldn’t just show a picture of the letter and the doodle?
It’s one of the great questions of the day that the Journal has not, so far, answered publicly. And one would imagine that either they have it and will produce it, or that they will get it and produce it. But there are worlds in which there could be some watermark on it. It could be part of some legal proceeding that we don’t know about. It could have come from some source where to reproduce it would somehow reveal either the source or a small pool of people from whom it could have come.
What does President Trump want to get out of a lawsuit against the Journal and Rupert Murdoch? What’s the aim?
Well, the aim is probably multifold. The aim is to exact vengeance against news organizations that dare to report troubling things about him in this second term when he has really fully blossomed the idea that he is the all-powerful executive, and people should not fall on the wrong side of him. What this does at the outset is say to his supporters, You don’t have to pay attention to this; this is bullshit.
I think it also expands the universe of the press that he’s designating as not trustworthy. It is very consistent with what he said to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes many years ago when he was first running for president, which is: Why do you do this? Why do you call us the fake news? Why do you attack us preemptively? And he says: It’s to discredit you so that if you ever write something negative about me, people already know not to believe it. And I think it serves as a warning for other news organizations, particularly ones that might be more sympathetic or more political in nature in his favor not to do things that might discomfit him because even the great Rupert Murdoch can come under his thumb.
In addition to the lawsuits, Trump has also barred the Wall Street Journal from the press pool on a trip that the president is taking to Scotland. For people who are not reporters, what’s the significance of that?
It’s essentially saying, I get to dictate who gets to cover me on behalf of the American people. And it’s intended to be a warning, as he did for the Associated Press. Let’s remember that the president said to the Associated Press: You can’t cover me in Oval Office events, in smaller settings, because you refuse to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico and call it by the term that I want to call it, which is the Gulf of America.
And so he punished the Associated Press, and although a judge ruled mostly against him, Trump is able to prevail. It’s his White House. In certain smaller settings, they can’t force the AP inside. And Trump’s saying, I don’t care who you’re owned by. I’m willing to do this to any of you.
What other media organizations has the president punished in the last, I don’t know, 18 months, and how?
The president, as a private citizen, before taking office in January, sued ABC and CBS. Without having to go through all the details, he got their parent companies to pay up $15, $16 million each toward his future presidential library on cases that were seen by legal scholars as certainly winnable, and in the case of CBS, just somewhat farcical.
He also won significant money from Meta and from Twitter, from X. He’s gone to the courts. His regulator, Brendan Carr, elevated to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has opened formal inquiries or investigations of every single major network in the country except the Fox Broadcast Network, which is owned of course by Rupert Murdoch, who has been, at least until now, a major ally of the president on the political right. He has gone after PBS and NPR. They’re currently under investigation by the FCC. He basically sought to assert control over the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by dint of being the head of the executive branch.
The list goes on and on. It’s almost like, who hasn’t he done this to? So there are ways in which he’s targeted the media that seem small, but there’s an effort to say not only that the press is somehow an outside and critical force, but that it is an enemy at the gates and we don’t want to let it inside. You can’t really interpret this strategy without viewing it as an effort to control almost any source of independent or outside information that could allow people to draw their own conclusions that run contrary to the president.
I’ve been turned into a full-time legal reporter. I’ve covered the media since 2000 and never have I found myself reading court records more. Never have I found myself in more courts in different courtrooms, federal, state, New York and Washington, having to follow stuff in Florida. There has just been a lot, and it’s part of where we’re at right now, and Trump is like, You know what? I’m going to lead the charge on that. Not only that, I’m going to model how you can go after the press.
