NEW YORK (AP) — At a particularly inopportune time for legacy media and CNN, the news outlet is on trial in Florida this week, accused of defaming a Navy veteran involved in rescuing endangered Afghans from that country when the U.S. ended its involvement there in 2021.
The veteran, Zachary Young, blames CNN for destroying his business when it displayed his face onscreen during a story that discussed a “black market” in smuggling out Afghans for high fees at the time of the Taliban takeover.
The case puts the news media on the stand in journalism critic Donald Trump’s home state just weeks before he is due to begin his second term as president. It also comes at a time when Facebook’s parent has introduced a Trump-friendly policy of backing off fact checks.
Young’s attorney, Kyle Roche, leaned into the press’ unpopularity in his opening arguments on Tuesday. “You’re going to have an opportunity to do something significant in this trial,” he told jurors. “You’re going to have an opportunity to send a message to mainstream media. You’re going to have an opportunity to change an industry.”
Actual defamation trials are rare in the United States, in part because of strong constitutional protections for the press, making it difficult to prove libel. Rather than defend statements made about Trump last spring, ABC News agreed to make his libel lawsuit go away by paying him $15 million toward his presidential library.
In the most high-profile libel case in recent years, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to settle the company’s claims of inaccurate reporting in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
CNN says the story amounts to “defamation by implication,” and that Young hadn’t actually been accused of nefarious acts. The initial story didn’t even mention Young until three minutes in, according to CNN lawyer David Axelrod. Five months after the story aired, Young complained about it, and CNN issued an on-air statement that its use of the phrase “black market” was wrong. “We did not intend to suggest that Mr. Young participated in a black market. We regret the error. And to Mr. Young, we apologize.”
The case is putting a media organization and its key players on the stand in a very public way, which is not usually seen in libel cases. “I always dread any kind of libel cases because the likelihood that something bad will come out of it is very high,” said Jane Kirtley, director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and the Law at the University of Minnesota. “This is not a great time to be a libel defendant if you’re in the news media. If we ever did have the support of the public, it has seriously eroded over the past few years.”
