Former President Donald Trump launched a lawsuit on Friday against CNN. He is suing for defamation, as reported by The Hill.
In the lawsuit filed Monday, Trump’s attorneys claim CNN “has sought to use its massive influence — purportedly as a ‘trusted’ news source — to defame the Plaintiff in the minds of its viewers and readers for the purpose of defeating him politically, culminating in CNN claiming credit for ‘[getting] Trump out’ in the 2020 presidential election.”
After the 2020 elections, Time magazine published a fascinating article that basically laid out the formal and informal cooperation between tech giants, news media and Democrat lawmakers to wrestle away the White House from Trump. It wasn’t exactly an admission of bald-faced cheating, but it was at least an acknowledgment that some of the most influential institutions in the country worked together to do what they were accusing Russia of doing for four years – influence voters and election outcomes.
The New York Times – a news outlet known for being The New York Times, a news outlet – announced they would not be directly quoting President Trump or carrying his live remarks. Instead, they would “add context.”
CNN followed suit, cutting away from the President’s remarks and airing unfounded accusations repeatedly. Progressives like to complain from their basements about their moms and dads who “only watch FAUX NEWS” upstairs all day. It is ironic, considering most of them only get their news from one source and often that source is CNN.
As someone who watches CNN as part of my job, I can confidently say that if all I watched all day was CNN and their mirror images across liberal mainstream media, I’d be terrified of Trump too. They have spent far too long adding “context” to the news of the nation, and their “context” always manages to look like Time’s now infamous recoloring of the O.J. Simpson mugshot – dark, dreary and scary as hell.
Here at RedState we’ve reported over and over again about CNN’s provable lies. They will not stop because they are never held accountable. The only way for conservatives to force the legacy media to go back to being real reporters is to make their activism cost them.
Just like Kyle Rittenhouse. Just like Nick Sandmann.
This is the way.
Trump is suing for $475 million in damages, and says he has plans to sue other outlets as well.
Trump announced his intent to sue the network earlier this summer, saying in a statement he would “also be commencing actions against other media outlets who have defamed me and defrauded the public regarding the overwhelming evidence of fraud throughout the 2020 Election.”
The former president’s attorneys allege in the filing that CNN “has undertaken a smear campaign to malign the Plaintiff with a barrage of negative associations and innuendos, broadcasting commentary that he is like a cult leader, a Russian lackey, a dog whistler to white supremacists, and a racist.”
It also cited anchors, personalities and pundits on CNN using the term “Big Lie” to refer to Trump’s repeated false statements about the 2020 election and voter fraud as evidence of the outlet attempting to associate him with Adolf Hitler.
This is the model many right-wing politicians and organizations will have to take. Until outlets like CNN actually lose something for telling open lies in service of a political end, they will keep doing what they do. Even now, there are probably many at CNN who can’t imagine President Trump could win such a thing. They see what they did as righteous, and so “normal” that the deliberate deception doesn’t even register as deception in their estimation. It just seems like “the right thing to do.”
Sandmann’s case was a bellwether event. To add a metaphor, Trump’s pending suits may well let loose a tidal wave.