Donald Trump’s antagonism towards the press has become so well-established as to be unremarkable.
In a recurring bit, he gripes about some reporter or coverage he doesn’t like, gestures to the press pen at the back of his rallies and encourages his followers to boo the journalists. He sends out all-caps screeds about reporters who have wronged him, assigns them dehumanizing nicknames (see: Maggot Haberman), vows to jail those who don’t disclose their sources, threatens to revoke cable news stations’ broadcast licenses.
Trump has threatened the media more than 100 times in the past two months alone, according to an October Reporters without Borders report. As the report noted, these episodes rarely make the news.
This attitude has become a fixture for many on the right, including one of Trump’s most ardent and thin-skinned supporters: Elon Musk.
Last November, Musk sued Media Matters for America, a progressive watchdog-journalism hybrid that specializes in monitoring right-wing media. Days before, it had published a report showing advertisements from major companies on X (formerly Twitter) juxtaposed with neo-Nazi content that also appears on X. Musk filed his suit in the Northern District of Texas, home to an infamous right-wing judge who ideologically aligned plaintiffs often seek out.
This kind of lawfare against media outlets, experts say, could become even more commonplace — and dangerous — under a Trump administration.
“This has been the playbook in Hungary, in India, Turkey, Poland — it’s a sign that we have an oligarchy, essentially,” Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, told TPM. “And it could be turbocharged under a Trump administration with the imprimatur of the state serving the whims of billionaires.”
Musk v. The Media
Musk, oddly, is not accusing Media Matters of defamation (though the word appears liberally in his company’s filings in the case). He’s saying that Media Matters fraudulently misused his platform by creating an account that followed these fringe figures and was refreshed so that the ads would generate. Media Matters pointed out in its briefs that Musk couldn’t argue that the posts and ads didn’t actually appear next to each other sometimes; he argued that the newsfeed just wouldn’t look like that for most users of the platform. He blamed Media Matters for hurting his company by sending advertisers fleeing (of course, the report came just after Musk endorsed an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, so the exact impetus of the advertiser flight is impossible to dissect).
“It’s not a serious lawsuit by any means,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told TPM.
“It’s purely frivolous,” added Caraballo.
It meets the definition, they said, of what’s known in some jurisdictions as a SLAPP lawsuit — strategic lawsuit against public participation — often used by rich plaintiffs to silence critics. These plaintiffs don’t file the lawsuits because they expect to win; they want to bury their critics in legal costs, go fishing for discovery and intimidate others who might criticize their behavior.
Earlier this month, a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked an order from U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor — the right-wing judge presiding over the case — that would have forced Media Matters to gather its donors’ information, along with the outlet’s communications with them, and to give X a log of it.
“We doubt that X Corp. needs the identity of Media Matters’s every donor, big or small, to advance its theories. Nor does it need the full residential addresses for any of those stated purposes,” the 5th Circuit panel wrote unanimously. “Conversely, Media Matters and its donors would bear a heavy burden if Media Matters had to release this information. It could enable others to harass or intimidate Media Matters or its donors.”
It’s a sign of how extreme Musk’s request was that this majority-Republican panel balked.
Musk, Trump And The State v. The Media
These kinds of lawsuits are likely to be a tool in the belt of Trump and his like-minded billionaires because the protections against them are so uneven. While most states have anti-SLAPP laws, they vary in strength. There is no federal anti-SLAPP law, despite sporadic attempts by Democratic lawmakers to pass one. And some appellate courts — including, coincidentally, the 5th Circuit — don’t allow the state protections to be invoked in federal court.
X changed its terms of service, to take effect in November, dictating that all disputes “will be brought exclusively in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, United States, and you consent to personal jurisdiction in those forums and waive any objection as to inconvenient forum.” The terms previously dictated that lawsuits would be brought in the much less reliably right-wing courts of San Francisco County. X recently moved its headquarters to Texas, but not to the northern district, the home of both O’Connor and a couple other favorite judges of right-wing litigants who get nearly all the cases in their divisions.
“Anyone with a Twitter account who says mean things about Musk can be brought down to the northern district of Texas,” Caraballo quipped.
The suits are also likely to recur because of the environment Trump, Musk and other right-wing billionaires have cultivated.
“The anti-press rhetoric and sentiment that has spread in the past 10 years or so, particularly since Trump began his campaign for president, that’s led to situation where public officials in particular and public figures — the Elon Musks of the world — aren’t gonna get the same kind of backlash they might have previously gotten for attempting to shut down a news outlet,” Stern said.
The financial precarity of the media landscape also makes outlets easier targets than their deeper-pocketed predecessors might have been. Media Matters laid off more than a dozen staffers amid Musk’s lawsuit, citing “a legal assault on multiple fronts.” The Republican attorneys general of Texas and Missouri had launched investigations into Media Matters following Musk’s lawsuit, which were blocked by a federal judge in D.C.
“This is going to become a national playbook to silence any critics,” Caraballo warned. “There is a non-insignificant risk that the Justice Department will be weaponized to go after media outlets.”
“You could see baseless FBI investigations,” she added.
First. Election insomnia-induced.
ETA:
As a illegal immigrant does musk have the right to sue?
While the request was extreme it’s also easy to suppose that the 5th Circuit wouldn’t want to set a precedent that donor information is reachable in litigation because that would create problems for the GOP donor-class.
" Musk filed his suit in the Northern District of Texas, home to an infamous right-wing judge who ideologically aligned plaintiffs often seek out"
Enough with the judge shopping Plus this country embraced Musk and this is his thanks, time to deport thisl immigrant…
I’m actually sleeping pretty well, although that might change as we get closer.
Still thinking about the MSG rally yesterday. They went there over and over again, I think, causing more fence sitters to run, not walk, to Kamala.