Trump v. BBC
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is On the Media's Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
What is Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC about?
So late last year, President Donald Trump sued the BBC for $10 billion, alleging that the program Panorama edited a segment to defame him. So far, Trump has faced some major roadblocks in extracting that sum or anything near it from the British broadcaster. For one thing, the BBC has little to gain from appeasing the American president. They're not subject to U.S. regulatory powers. But the money isn't always the point.
Donald Trump loves to sue media outlets. He's been doing it for a very long time.
Liz Dye is a legal journalist and the host of the Law and Chaos podcast. Although it has some unusual features, and we'll get to them shortly, Dye sees the BBC suit as part of Trump's established record of troll suits.
One of the most notable early Trump media lawsuits was against a reporter named Tim O'Brien, who wrote a book in 2005 called Trump Nation. At the time, Trump was claiming to be a billionaire, but O'Brien said his net worth was actually $250 million at most. So in 2006, Trump sued O'Brien for libel in New Jersey, demanding $5 billion. So that's the MO right there. The case was tossed, and it was tossed on appeal as well. But to Trump, that was still a win. He has two quotes that really summarize his position. In one, he said, "...ultimately, I had great success doing what I wanted to do, costing this third-rate reporter a lot of legal fees." And he told the Washington Post, I spent a couple bucks on legal fees and they spent a whole lot more.
I did it to make his life miserable, which I'm happy about. So that is Trump's philosophy. He uses litigation against media outlets as a weapon and he makes them pay. He doesn't make them pay because he wins these lawsuits. In fact, he almost never does. But litigation is cripplingly expensive. And in this country, in almost every instance, you pay your own legal fees, win or lose.
So there are several suits pending at the moment. Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal for describing the drawing he made for Epstein's birthday. He drew boobs.
He did draw boobs, yeah.
We've all seen the picture. And he's sued CNN. You want to go through some of these?
Sure. He sued CNN in between his two presidencies. He said that using the word big lie was defamatory. The big lie in reference to his claim about a stolen election. Right, because he says it has Nazi associations. He's currently defamatory. suing the Des Moines Register over a whiffed poll of Iowa in 2024. He's using Iowa's consumer fraud statute in that lawsuit. He likes to do that. He used the same consumer fraud theory to sue CBS for tortuously editing 60 Minutes, an interview with Kamala Harris. A lot of these networks have settled for huge payouts to his ballroom or his presidential library. Right. But they never settled with him before he came back to office. Right. When he was thrown off of the social media platforms, he sued Meta and Google and X, claiming that they had tortiously deplatformed him.
He had a very strange theory of the case there, that the social media platforms became agents of the government and violated his First Amendment rights. And the tech platforms had already won at the trial court. The case was on appeal when he came back to the White House. Those three platforms decided to lose. and pay him off instead in the same way that CBS did because they had regulatory issues in front of the administration. If you know that this government can bring a massive antitrust lawsuit against you or an FCC enforcement action, you have many reasons to pay up. And that is indeed what they did.
And these, what you call Trump's troll suits, pretty much never lead to victory in court.
Yeah. So I like to call these lawsuit-shaped objects.
How has Trump historically used lawsuits to pressure media outlets?
They are not traditional complaints. They often don't state a cause of action. In fact, he recently filed one against the New York Times that was so offensively defective that the judge threw it out on his own without being asked by the New York Times three days later. He's now refiled it.
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