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I was not entirely surprised to hear that Donald Trump, for the first time as president, will take the stage at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, to be held next weekend at the Washington Hilton. If there is one thing Trump cannot resist, it is the role of protagonist—even if that means engineering his own drama or, in this case, as several outlets have noted, possible embarrassment. Trump will be forced to watch as the Wall Street Journal is praised for “courage and accountability” for breaking a story about Trump’s apparent birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, in 2003, when he sent what the Journal called a “bawdy” note, framed by a sketch of a naked female torso, and wrote, “May every day be another wonderful secret.” That embarrassment may be compounded by the fact that, last Monday, a federal judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit Trump brought against the Journal, its publisher, Dow Jones, and its parent company, News Corp, among others, relating to that story. US District Judge Darrin Gayles, of the Southern District of Florida in Miami, said Trump was “nowhere close” to proving the “actual malice” standard for defamation cases. 

Talk among the press corps of Trump’s embarrassment, though, seems more wishful than realistic; to be humiliated, after all, requires the capacity to feel shame. No one really knows what Trump might feel, much less what he will say on the dais on Saturday. As twenty-six hundred ticket-holders sit there in bow ties and evening gowns, Trump might let fly some of his recent insults and threats—that the news media has been “almost treasonous” in covering the Iran war, that reporters who don’t rat out leakers will be “jailed,” that journalists are “enemies of the people”—or he might smile amiably. Over Trump’s long career, his attitude toward the press has danced between hatred and codependency. He has regularly attacked and sued journalists, even as he cultivated them, nudging them toward more acquiescent coverage or lavishing them with access to keep his name in the headlines. Those strategies have been evident most recently in the dozens of phone calls between the president and the reporters who have his cell number. Several journalists, understandably, have announced that they are opting out of the whole WHCA charade, avoiding the dinner and its odor of chumminess. Others will be wearing First Amendment lapel pins, although Jim Acosta, a former CNN correspondent who has clashed publicly with Trump, questioned the efficacy of that plan as Trump is “shredding the Constitution.”

But here is what we do know: In a string of court cases, judges have ruled against Trump and his administration’s efforts to shut down critical journalism. These decisions have revealed that many of Trump’s executive actions and legal threats against the press are hollow—and exposed the capitulation by some prominent outlets as needless, cowardly, and self-defeating.

Trump has sought to use defamation suits to intimidate the press, only to see a number of them shatter on impact with the court system. He filed the personal lawsuit against Dow Jones and News Corp (which also named Rupert Murdoch and others directly) last July, claiming that the Journal had sought to malign his character by publishing the birthday message to Epstein and that the journalists “knew or should have known” their reporting was false. The reporters, as you’d expect, had gone to Trump for comment before publishing the story, and Epstein’s birthday materials were later released by the House Oversight Committee. In his dismissal, Gayles wrote that “the Complaint fails to adequately allege actual malice,” the standard set for defamation cases by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), which compels claimants to prove actual malice by demonstrating knowledge of falsity and “reckless disregard” for the truth on the part of publishers. Trump tried to play down the dismissal on Truth Social—and plans to refile before an April 27 deadline—but it was one of several recent legal setbacks. 

On March 20, Paul Friedman, a judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled in favor of the New York Times, finding that reporting restrictions introduced by the Pentagon last year were unconstitutional. The Pentagon responded by banishing journalists to an annex, which the court rejected on April 9. (The Pentagon intends to appeal again; reporters remain in limbo.) And last September, a federal judge threw out a defamation lawsuit against the Times, Penguin Random House, and four journalists. Judge Steven D. Merryday called it “improper and impermissible” and said a “complaint is not a megaphone for public relations.” (Trump refiled in October.) 

The Trump administration has faced a number of other unwelcome legal decisions relating to its efforts to kill off public media. In March, Royce C. Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee who serves on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled that actions by Kari Lake at the United States Agency for Global Media—which included mass layoffs at Voice of America and other congressionally funded news outlets—were null and void, ordering more than a thousand employees back to work. (The government filed an appeal and a request to stay that order; on March 31, a federal appeals court paused the ruling to reinstate the laid-off staffers.) Also in March, a different judge from the same district, Randolph Moss, who was appointed by Barack Obama, ruled that Trump’s executive orders barring federal funding for NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment—although the decision has no bearing on Congress’s vote last summer to revoke more than 1.1 billion dollars in funding that led to the dissolution of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

And another federal judge barred the Justice Department from scouring devices seized from Hannah Natanson, the Washington Post reporter whose home was raided by FBI agents in January, ruling that the court itself should undertake the search. Moreover, in at least three cases, Trump’s “broadsides against traditional news outlets” have ended up “haunting him in court,” the Times’ Erik Wemple pointed out earlier this month, with judges citing “attacks on the press by Mr. Trump and his appointees when ruling against the government.”

The fact that, in court, the First Amendment and related case law have continued to protect news organizations against actions designed to silence reporting makes it all the more depressing that some outlets have chosen to bend the knee. ABC News’s decision to pay the president fifteen million dollars to settle a weak libel case in 2024 was met with confused disbelief. Paramount’s agreement to settle another suit—for sixteen million dollars, over the editing of a CBS News interview with Kamala Harris—was widely interpreted as a cynical wheel-greaser to gain approval for its merger with Skydance. 

The aftershocks of these decisions, from some of the country’s biggest and richest newsrooms, are being felt across the industry. As Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said on CJR’s The Kicker podcast in February, “Whenever an institution like CBS capitulates in this way, doesn’t defend its First Amendment rights, it creates a kind of precedent, not a legal precedent but a factual precedent, which I think shapes people’s understanding of press freedom.” If a deep-pocketed outlet such as ABC doesn’t contest a defamation suit, it sends a signal to smaller, independent, and local outlets that some stories aren’t worth the risk. This underscores the importance of large and well-resourced news organizations contesting spurious lawsuits or bogus reporting restrictions—not just for their own benefit, but for the industry writ large. The odds are in their favor.

Update: This article was amended to clarify language around the requirements for plaintiffs to prove defamation as set by New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964).

Other Notable Stories …

• Last Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) announced that Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, an independent journalist who had worked with outlets such as PBS Frontline and the New York Times, had been arrested and detained in Kuwait since March 3. Shihab-Eldin, an American-born Kuwaiti citizen of Palestinian descent, has been charged with “spreading false information, harming national security, and misusing his mobile phone,” according to CPJ. Aida Alami, who has known Shihab-Eldin for years, wrote about his detention for CJR. Jodie Ginsberg, CPJ’s chief executive, told Alami that censorship of journalists has increased dramatically during the Iran war, with “national security” being used as a “pretext to crack down on freedom of speech…Shihab-Eldin’s detention is emblematic of that.”

• Aron D’Souza, who helped lead the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker after it published a sex tape of Hulk Hogan, has launched a startup called Objection. The company claims it will use AI to adjudicate claims made in the course of, among other things, journalistic reporting; users can pay two thousand dollars to challenge a story and trigger an investigation. Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who funded the lawsuit against Gawker, was among those who contributed “multiple millions in seed funding” for Objection, which experts argue has the potential to chill whistleblowing, according to TechCrunch. In a revealing Q&A transcript, TechCrunch’s Rebecca Bellan challenged D’Souza: “What you’re asking—putting every article up for a score—means journalists have to do extra labor to avoid being diminished in the public eye for work they’ve already done the legwork for.… How is this different from SLAPP suits? This is just cheaper and more scalable.” 

• More than a thousand film and TV professionals have signed an open letter protesting Paramount Skydance’s pending takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, including actors (Rose Byrne, Mark Ruffalo, Emma Thompson) and directors (Yorgos Lanthimos, Celine Song, Laura Poitras) as well as producers, writers, journalists, and many others. “Increasingly, a small number of powerful entities determine what gets made—and on what terms—leaving creators and independent businesses with fewer viable paths to sustain their work,” the letter, organized by a coalition of advocacy groups, said. Acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN, will significantly expand the Ellison family’s media empire. David Ellison sought to soothe Hollywood nerves later in the week, promising at least thirty Paramount-Warner movies a year. Breaker also reported that Ellison plans an “intimate” dinner this week “honoring” Donald Trump. 

• In Washington, DC, NOTUS announced it will rebrand as The Star in June. The outlet, launched in 2023 with twenty million dollars in startup funding from Robert Allbritton, Politico’s cofounder, is seeking to fill coverage gaps left by the deep cuts at the Washington Post, including by hiring many former Post journalists. According to the Times, NOTUS began the year with a newsroom of forty-five people and expects to end it with ninety-five journalists. The new name references a paper once owned by Allbritton’s father, an afternoon daily called the Washington Star, which stopped publishing in 1981. 

• In the UK, reports circulated last week that the BBC is planning massive layoffs that will erase at least eighteen hundred jobs, in an effort to save about five hundred million pounds (678 million dollars) from its four-billion-pound budget. The public broadcaster’s interim director general, Rhodri Talfan Davies, was “incredibly frustrated” that the news leaked before employees had been informed, according to Deadline. The BBC’s new director general, Matt Brittin, a former Google executive, takes over next month; his predecessor, Tim Davie, and the chief executive of BBC News, Deborah Turness, were forced out last year.

• And on April 9, Sarah Palin withdrew her appeal related to her failed defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, ending a nine-year legal fight that some conservatives had hoped would be a route to overturning the Supreme Court’s decision in Times v. Sullivan. Palin, the former Republican governor of Alaska and 2008 vice-presidential nominee, sued the Times over a June 14, 2017, editorial that “wrongly suggested she had incited a deadly shooting in Arizona years earlier.” (The newspaper apologized and corrected the claim two days later.) Two federal juries found the Times was not liable for defaming Palin, the first in 2022, which was invalidated on appeal, and again in 2025. 

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