On today’s show: NPR’s David Folkenflik explains why CBS stands at the epicenter of Trump’s assault on the media. Immigration arrests in churches? Some clergy say not so fast. Andrea Castillo, federal-immigration reporter for the L.A. Times, has details on the pushback. Trump says minting the 1-cent coin is “wasteful.” Time has what to know about the yearslong debate over whether to stop. Plus, federal authorities appealed an order to unfreeze certain federal spending, Hamas said it will delay the release of the next round of Israeli hostages, and the DOJ ordered prosecutors to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Full Episode
Good morning. It's Tuesday, February 11th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, what happens when ICE shows up at church, a pretty compelling argument to quit the penny, and the DOJ moves to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. But first, President Trump is aggressively going after media companies in lawsuits and winning.
In December, Disney, which owns ABC News, settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump over a false claim made on the air. It agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump's future presidential foundation. In late January, Meta settled a suit with Trump for $22 million and another $3 million in legal fees over suspending Trump's account after the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Now, President Trump is suing the owner of CBS News, Paramount Global, and he recently doubled down, literally doubling the damage claim from $10 billion to $20 billion.
CBS is the avatar for Trump's multi-front assault on the media and the news media in particular.
NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik told us what's happening at CBS is the latest chapter in Trump's attempt to use the power of the presidency to strong-arm the media. In this particular suit, Trump claims that CBS's 60 Minutes aired a deceptively edited interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris to boost her election chances.
One example Trump's suit gives is a clip of Harris's answer to a question about Israel used on CBS's Face the Nation, which was different from the answer shown in a lengthier broadcast of the same interview on 60 Minutes.
Trump's legal team argued that CBS had engaged in, quote, unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion. What CBS said was this is part and parcel of what journalistic choices involve all the time. What journalists like you are confronted with in compressing a longer interview to meet the time imperatives of the programming
In December, CBS asked the judge to dismiss the case or move it to New York, where CBS is based and where the show in question was edited. The case was filed in a Texas court that's been friendly to conservative interests. Folk Inflect told us legal scholars and media experts say Trump's argument here is weak.
This is frivolous. And I've got to tell you, every legal expert I've spoken to on this say that this is essentially an abuse of the courts. There's no legal grounds that they can point to in precedent that would support this as voter interference. And in fact, of course, Trump won. Trump won in Texas. Trump won in the country. It doesn't feel as though somehow this interview harmed him.
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