lawsuits

SportsCenter co-anchor Sage Steele has sued ESPN and corporate parent The Walt Disney Co. for allegedly violating both her contract and her free speech rights, according to multiple reports. Steele is reportedly claiming that the network “sidelined” her last year after she made remarks about ESPN’s COVID policy and former President Barack Obama’s ethnic identity.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Atlanta says Leakes, who is Black, complained to executives about years of racist remarks from fellow housewife Kim Zolciak-Biermann, who is White, but that only Leakes suffered consequences. It names as defendants NBCUniversal, Bravo, production companies True Entertainment and Truly Original, executives from the companies and Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen, but not Zolciak-Biermann.

CBS shareholders have reached a $14.75 million settlement in their securities lawsuit against Leslie Moonves and the network regarding how it dealt with the sexual misconduct allegations against the disgraced former chairman-CEO and how his previous #MeToo comments affected the company’s financial performance.

Facebook parent Meta is urging a federal appellate court to intervene in a lawsuit brought by advertisers suing the company over allegedly inflated metrics. In papers filed this week with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Facebook seeks permission to immediately appeal U.S. District Court Judge James Donato’s decision granting class-action status to the companies DZ Reserve (an e-commerce store operator) and Max Martialis (which sells weapons accessories).

The Ohio Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in a case that could change how streaming platforms operate. The city of Maple Heights, outside Cleveland, sued Netflix and Hulu in federal court in 2020. It argues that the streaming platforms should pay local governments franchise fees similar to what cable television providers have to pay. The federal court sent two questions to the Ohio Supreme Court to decide: Are Netflix and Hulu considered “video service providers?” Does Maple Heights have the right to challenge the companies over the issue? No state’s supreme court has ruled on those issues.

An April 2023 jury trial has been scheduled in Dominion Voting Systems Inc.’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit accusing Fox News of trying to boost its ratings by falsely claiming the voting machine company rigged the 2020 U.S. presidential election against former President Donald Trump.

Computer companies are standing up for Twitter in federal court, telling the federal appeals court for the Ninth Circuit that it should reject and rethink a panel decision ruling against Twitter’s challenge to an investigation by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The Walking Dead is coming to an end this year, and so it seems is most of the long-standing legal action by Robert Kirkman and other executive producers of the zombie apocalypse series against AMC. In a final ruling Wednesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Daniel Buckley gutted most of the fight pitting Kirkman, Gale Anne Hurd, David Alpert and fellow TWD EPs Charles Eglee and Glen Mazzara against the cable network.

A Tegna shareholder has sued the broadcaster and its board seeking to enjoin the company from closing its sale to Standard General because its proxy statements are “false and misleading.” Marc Waterman, who says in the suit he is an owner of Tegna common stock, filed the suit in the United States District Court on March 30.

Handing Facebook parent Meta Platforms a defeat, a federal judge has granted class-action status to advertisers suing the company over allegedly inflated metrics.

Four years after Judith Sheindlin, CBS and others were sued by a producer from the early seasons of the Judge Judy series and the estate of another producer over profits from the big bucks sale of the show’s library, the almost lucratively esoteric dispute looks to have come to the end of the legal road, at least for now.

After a New York state judge denied its motion to dismiss a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, Fox News filed four separate answers in the case: Fox News, Fox Corp, Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs.

A small, Cleveland suburb, Maple Heights, has filed a lawsuit against Netflix and Hulu, trying to force the streaming companies to pay a franchise fee typically applied to cable providers. The lawsuit is part of a growing national trend of cities in at least 13 states, often pinched by shrinking budgets, targeting the nascent streaming industry for new tax revenues. The city’s suit is filed under a state law written and passed in 2007 — when Netflix was mostly mailing its customers DVDs and Hulu had yet to launch.

The suit charges the ratings firm with fraud and concealment and alleges media companies have suffered billions of dollars in damages.

One America News might have to shut down because of DirecTV’s decision to drop the right-wing network from its channel lineup, OAN said in a lawsuit against DirecTV and its owner AT&T. DirecTV recently said it will drop OAN after their carriage contract expires in early April. DirecTV will also drop AWE (A Wealth of Entertainment), as OAN and AWE are both owned by Herring Networks. Herring alleges breach of contract and other violations were committed by AT&T, DirecTV and AT&T Board Chairman William Kennard.

The lawyers and First Amendment scholars who have made it their life’s work to defend the well-established but newly threatened constitutional protections for journalists don’t usually root for the media to lose in court. But that’s what is happening with a series of recent defamation lawsuits against right-wing outlets that legal experts say could be the most significant libel litigation in recent memory.

Nielsen has sued potential rival TVSquared, alleging that TVSquared infringed on a Nielsen patent covering measuring audience exposure across platforms while protecting viewers’ personal information. TVSquared was acquired last weekfor about $160 million by Innovid,

HBO was hit with a class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that it shares subscribers’ viewing history with Facebook, in violation of a federal privacy law. A class action law firm, Bursor & Fisher, filed the suit in federal court in New York on behalf of two HBO Max subscribers, Angel McDaniel and Constance Simon. The suit alleges that HBO provides Facebook with customer lists, which allows Facebook to match customers’ viewing habits with their Facebook profiles.

A New York State Supreme Court judge ruled that a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News Channel by the voting-technology company Smartmatic can proceed, despite Fox’s motion to have the matter dismissed. The suit is the second of its kind that has cleared a potential legal hurdle and has been allowed to continue making its way through the courts.

Kevin Hunter is suing Debmar-Mercury for wrongfully terminating him from his longtime role as executive producer of The Wendy Williams Show. The complaint claimed he was fired “on the basis of his marital status, which is barred by the New York City Human Rights Law.”

Right-wing U.S. television network Newsmax Media on Monday countersued Smartmatic Corp., an election security firm that says it was defamed by Newsmax’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election. Smartmatic sued Newsmax in November for amplifying false claims that Smartmatic voting machines rigged the election against then-President Donald Trump, who persists in falsely claiming his defeat was the result of fraud.

From the start of his presidential bid, Donald Trump took full advantage of the public’s growing mistrust of the mainstream press. The journalists tirelessly chronicling the near-daily scandals erupting from his White House were “scum,” he taunted. They were dishonest, he insisted. They were “the enemy of the people.” Now, more than a year after Trump’s presidential term ended, three volatile lawsuits forged in the culture-war fire he stoked are making their way through the legal system.

The trial comes at a time when those who argue that news outlets should pay a steeper price for getting something wrong are more emboldened than they’ve been in decades.

A federal court judge in California has reversed a ruling dismissing media mogul Byron Allen’s $10 billion lawsuit charging that McDonald’s discriminated against Black-owned media when it buys advertising. In a new order entered Friday, Judge Fernando Olguin denied McDonald’s motion to dismiss without prejudice and said McDonald’s has to answer Allen’s complaint by Jan. 27.

Major League Wrestling is accusing WWE and its CEO Vince McMahon of forcing Tubi to scuttle a streaming deal with MLW in a new lawsuit. The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday in California, also goes on to accuse McMahon of intimidating Vice TV, which had a programming deal with MLW, out of airing more content from the upstart wrestling league.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is pressing a federal appellate court to allow the state to enforce a new law that would prohibit Twitter, Facebook and YouTube from suppressing users’ posts based on viewpoint. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman in Austin blocked the law in early December, ruling that the measure violated tech companies’ First Amendment rights to exercise editorial discretion over the material they publish.

Siding with LinkedIn, a federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit by two advertisers that accused the company of inflating ad metrics. The ruling, issued Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen in the Northern District of California, stems from a lawsuit brought last December by tech company TopDevz and recruiting platform Noirefy. They alleged in a class-action complaint that LinkedIn’s erroneous metrics allowed the company to charge inflated prices for ads.

The New York State judge also ordered The Times to turn over physical copies and destroy any electronic versions of documents a lawyer prepared for the conservative group.

Weeks after Kyle Rittenhouse said he wanted to “lay low” when he was found not guilty of homicide, attempted homicide and other charges related to last year’s fatal shootings that rocked Kenosha, Wis., the teen was welcomed Monday at a conservative conference to music, pyrotechnics and a standing ovation from thousands of attendees. Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two men and injured another during mass protests against police violence in August 2020, suggested Monday that lawsuits could be filed against media outlets for how they covered his murder trial.