Federal judge throws out Trump's $475 million CNN defamation lawsuit
The case centered on the network's use of the phrase "the big lie" to describe Trump's claims to have won the 2020 election
CNN has had a rough go of it of late, exemplified in the very brief tenure of recently ousted CEO Chris Licht, who was put in the job (and then un-put from it shortly after) by Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav. But the 24-hour news network has racked up at least one win this week, as a federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit from Donald Trump, which claimed defamation against him by the channel.
Per Deadline, the Trump lawsuit was focused primarily on the phrase “the Big Lie,” which several CNN correspondents used to describe Trump’s contention that he’d actually won the 2020 election. Given that the phrase “Big lie” in politics is most closely associated with Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels, the Trump camp sued on the grounds that CNN was covertly calling them all Nazis. Trump’s suit also highlighted other times people on CNN actually just literally compared him to Hitler, which we would not necessarily want to have entered into the legal record in such a public way, but to each their own.
U.S. District Judge Raag Singhal—a Trump appointee, as it happens—shot that reasoning down, arguing, essentially, that, in modern discourse, drawing Hitler allusions isn’t the same as stating you think someone is an actual, literal Nazi. Or, to put it in Singhal’s words, while he finds “Nazi references in the political discourse (made by whichever ‘side’) to be odious and repugnant…bad rhetoric is not defamation when it does not include false statements of fact. CNN’s use of the phrase ‘the Big Lie’ in connection with Trump’s election challenges does not give rise to a plausible inference that Trump advocates the persecution and genocide of Jews or any other group of people. No reasonable viewer could (or should) plausibly make that reference.” And while we’d argue that the definition of “reasonable viewer” has gotten pretty damn scary over the last few years, it’s at least nice to know Trump won’t be getting any of the $475 million he sued for here.
(Singhal did get in some complaining of his own, though, taking time out of his decision to gripe at length about the media’s coverage of the Supreme Court’s recent tackling of Affirmative Action, before resignedly writing “This is the news model of today.”)