President-elect Donald Trump has sued the Des Moines Register for its disastrously wrong preelection polling, his latest move in a crusade to demand accountability for the media’s election snafus.
The lawsuit argues that the poll, published three days before the Nov. 5 general elections and showing Vice President Kamala Harris with a lead in Iowa when she lost the state by 13 points, defied “credulity” and should have been discarded.
Mr. Trump’s attorneys called the poll “manipulated” and “election-interfering fiction.”
The lawsuit, filed under Iowa’s consumer fraud laws, targets the Register, pollster Ann Selzer and Gannett, which owns the newspaper.
The poll struck some observers as wildly off base because of the voters sampled. Still, several media outlets trumpeted it as a sign that Mr. Trump was weak in Midwestern states or struggling in usually strong Republican areas.
Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer, called the lawsuit unprecedented.
“The notion that a candidate who won an election would sue a newspaper that published what turned out to be an incorrect poll predicting his defeat is surely unknown in our history,” he told The Washington Times in an email.
He called the lawsuit “a real threat to journalistic freedom” because it could pressure some outlets, particularly smaller newspapers, to not publish preelection polls.
Suing the newspaper is part of Mr. Trump’s broader attempt to demand more sober coverage from news outlets that have erred in their reporting on the once and future president.
Most notably, outlets breathlessly reported the details of the now-discredited Steele dossier in 2017, tainting the start of Mr. Trump’s first term with unfounded stories about ties to Russia.
Mr. Trump has urged The New York Times and The Washington Post to return Pulitzer prizes they won in 2018 for coverage that the prize committee said “dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”
Mr. Trump last week settled a defamation lawsuit against ABC News after one of its personalities, George Stephanopoulos, said the former president was found “liable” in a civil trial for raping a woman, E. Jean Carroll. The jury in the civil case decided he sexually abused Ms. Carroll but didn’t find that he raped her.
ABC agreed to pay $15 million, which will go to a presidential foundation.
Mr. Trump has also sued CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He said the newsmagazine’s preelection interview with Ms. Harris was deceptively edited and amounted to “election and voter interference.”
Mr. Trump’s second election win has forced a reckoning by news organizations that have delivered overwhelmingly negative coverage of him for nearly a decade.
In late October, analysts at the Media Research Center said Mr. Trump had 85% negative coverage in their sample of the flagship news broadcasts from ABC, CBS and NBC. Ms. Harris, meanwhile, received 78% positive reports from the outlets.
Despite that, or because of it, Mr. Trump emerged with a relatively easy victory. He won big in the Electoral College count and by 1.5 percentage points in the national popular vote over Ms. Harris.
On Monday, he teased the lawsuit against the Des Moines newspaper for its poll.
“In my opinion, it was fraud and it was election interference,” he said at a press conference.
The news outlet said he has no case.
“We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register preelection poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, cross tabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” said Lark-Marie Anton, a Gannett spokeswoman. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
The lawsuit against ABC, filed in March, was for defamation based on false statements. To win in court, Mr. Trump had to prove that the rape claim was wrong and that it was made with malice.
The settlement short-circuits that process and protects ABC from some disclosures during legal discovery.
The lawsuits against CBS and the Iowa newspaper are different.
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against CBS in federal court in Texas argues that the broadcast of the “60 Minutes” interview with Ms. Harris violated the federal Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
In its initial reply to the lawsuit, CBS said news outlets have never used the law to police editorial decisions.
“Under President Trump’s interpretation, the DTPA would become a weapon for any candidate to challenge media coverage they did not like,” the network’s attorney said in a court filing. “The DTPA has never been so used, and it has no application to the alleged facts here.”
Legal experts have been skeptical of Mr. Trump’s election-related legal action. Indeed, he has had little success with challenges to news organizations.
In the past several years, lawsuits naming The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN have been dismissed.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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