The Supreme Court will not take up a case from a billionaire real estate developer who called on the court to overturn a landmark ruling that has protected journalists from libel lawsuits for decades.
Donald Trump-supporting Republican megadonor Steve Wynn urged the court to revisit the precedent established by 1964’s New York Times v Sullivan, which determined that public figures must prove “actual malice” from a news organization’s reporting to successfully sue them for defamation.
“Sullivan is not equipped to handle the world as it is today — media is no longer controlled by companies that employ legions of factcheckers before publishing an article,” attorneys for Wynn wrote in a recent petition to the court. “Instead, everyone in the world has the ability to publish any statement with a few keystrokes. And in this age of clickbait journalism, even those members of the legacy media have resorted to libelous headlines and false reports to generate views.”
The justices denied his petition Monday.
Nevada real estate developer Steve Wynn unsuccessfully called on the Supreme Court to hear his case challenging decades-old precedent that shields news organizations from defamation lawsuits that are unable to prove ‘actual malice’ against public officials (REUTERS)
Wynn brought his case to the Supreme Court after lower courts rejected his 2018 lawsuit against the Associated Press, which published information from police reports detailing allegations of sexual misconduct against him in the 1970s. Wynn has denied the allegations.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly argued that news outlets and journalists should be punished, even criminally, for adversarial reporting. Trump himself has pushed the courts to challenge Sullivan in his lawsuits against media outlets, with his attorneys stating in a failed lawsuit against CNN that the precedent “no longer merely provides ‘breathing space’ for the occasional misstatement, but rather, offers a nearly impenetrable shield to the media, allowing it to publish defamatory statements targeting political enemies, without fear of consequence.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative justices have also signaled their willingness to revisit Sullivan. In his dissent in a similar case in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas claimed that the precedent “and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.’”
Since returning to the presidency, Trump has blocked the Associated Press from covering White House events, promoted misleading claims about Reuters, removed space for journalists at the Pentagon, and launched investigations into media organizations the president routinely attacks.
The president — who recently lambasted “illegal” news organizations — spent his three presidential campaigns and first four years in office raging against a free press he calls “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” while waging a legal war against the media in courtrooms across the country.
He repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for news networks over critical coverage or stories he didn’t like and then sued top networks for defamation. He is currently trying to force CBS to pay him $10 billion over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris he claims was edited to illegally influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
In office, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission’s chair Brendan Carr has launched probes into public broadcasting services NPR and PBS and revived complaints into CBS, ABC, and NBC, but has not touched any explicitly right-wing news outlets.
