Jessell | Broadcasters: Have WJFW’s Back In Trump Suit

I’m not saying that President Trump is a bully, but his campaign sure is.

The campaign is upset about an anti-Trump spot that a lot of stations in key battleground states ran over the past several weeks. It believes the spot, which portrays the president as clueless in his handling of the pandemic and makes it appear that he called it a flat-out “hoax,” is false and defamatory.

After sending warning letters to many broadcasters on March 25 demanding that they stop airing the spot, the campaign last week followed through on its threat just like a bully. It looked over the stations that ran the spot and went after one of the weakest.

It sued WJFW in Rhinelander, Wis., for libel.

The NBC affiliate is the third-ranked station in DMA 134, a market that generates maybe — maybe — $20 million in total TV ad sales in a good year. And WJFW is not part of some billion-dollar station group. Owner Joseph Fuchs has just one other station, equally tiny WVII Bangor, Maine.

In its 18-page complaint, filed this week in the Wisconsin state court in Price County, the campaign is demanding unspecified damages, court costs, attorneys’ fees and a jury trial.

The suit goes right for the free-press jugular, the actual malice standard, alleging “reckless disregard for the truth.” In other words, the campaign contends that WJFW knew the spot was false and went ahead and aired it anyway. That’s the one thing you can’t do when you are going after public figures like the president.

Well, we all know how to deal with a bully. You hit back.

I encourage Fuchs to defend this spot and his right to air it as vigorously as he can. And I call on the NAB and other broadcast groups to voice their support, intervene in the case and, if necessary, chip in for the defense.

By backing WJFW, broadcasters will show that will not be intimidated by the next cease-and-desist letter that comes in the certified mail and that they will not tolerate any assault on their long-established First Amendment rights.

There is also a practical reason to come to WJFW’s aid. Many stations ran that spot. If WJFW is guilty, so are they.

I contacted RTDNA Executive Director Dan Shelley and he agrees that every media outlet has a stake in defending WJFW. “Today it may be a station in Rhinelander; tomorrow it could easily be any station in the country,” he says.

And he also didn’t like the idea of picking on a station on the edge of the broadcasting herd. “If the Trump campaign has an issue with the ad, it should take it up with the creators of the ad,” Shelley says.

The creator of the ad is Priorities USA, a PAC that has raised more than $100 million to drive Trump from office this fall.

The campaign takes issue with one sentence in the ad that Priorities USA lifted from a Trump rally in Charleston, S.C., on Feb. 28 — “Coronavirus, this is their new hoax.”

According to the complaint, the sentence was spliced together from two Trump different sound bites — “coronavirus” and “this is their new hoax” — to make it seem as if Trump called the virus itself a “hoax.”

However, when heard or read in context, the complaint says, it’s clear that the president was saying that it wasn’t the virus that was a hoax, but rather the Democrat’s “politicization” of the pandemic crisis.

Giving weight to the complaint are a couple of respected fact-checkers that vetted a Biden ad that used the same pieced-together Trump “hoax” line and declared that because of it the ad was deceptive to one degree or another. Politifact declared it “False” and the Washington Post gave it four Pinocchios, its highest rating for false information.

I have my own take on it.

When I read the transcripts or watch the video on the Trump rally, what I hear is Trump saying is that the virus as a serious threat is a hoax. That’s what the Democrats were essentially saying — that the virus was dangerous and that Trump wasn’t giving it the attention it deserved. That’s how they were, to use Trump’s term, “politicizing” the pandemic.

Indeed, the entire thrust of Trump’s comments on the virus that day was to downplay it. “We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that,” he said at one point.

Moments later, he said that the flu kills on average 35,000 people every year. “So far we have lost nobody to the coronavirus in the U.S. — nobody — and it doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared…. But think of it: You hear [35,000] and 40,000 people and we lost nobody. You wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”

So, yes, Trump did not say the virus was a hoax. But, frankly, for Trump to stand up there and suggest that the Democrats and the media were overblowing the situation and that the virus wasn’t much to worry about comes damn close in my mind.

Given the liberties with the truth that candidates of both parties and their backers have taken in attack ads over the years, I would say that the spot was well within the bounds of acceptability in political speech. Its veracity is no worse than many others that have aired on TV and is probably much better than many that circulate in social media.

Because of the actual malice standard set in the Supreme Court’s landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case, it is extremely difficult for a public figure to prevail in a libel case and the more public the figure is, the more difficult it becomes. And few men are more public than Donald J. Trump, the real plaintiff in this case.

Nonetheless, it behooves Fuchs and the entire industry to take this case seriously. Trump has been at war with the media since he began his first campaign in 2015 and has vowed to challenge libel laws to make it easier for offended parties to sue and win.

After suing Buzzfeed for libel two years ago, President Trump called the libel laws a “sham.”

“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws, so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts,” he said.

If you think such talk is just Trump bluster and the campaign is just out for some headlines, consider this: WFJW may have been targeted not only because it is small and has limited resources, but also because of where it is — in the heart of Wisconsin Trump country.

The campaign filed its suit in Price County, one county over from Oneida County where Rhinelander and WJFW are.

In the 2016 election, Price county cast 60% of its votes for Trump and only 35% for Clinton. That means that a random jury there would have a supermajority of Trump fans. And the county has just one judge, Kevin Klein, who was appointed to the bench in 2017 by then Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Trump and his campaign could not have picked a better venue.

Harry A. Jessell is editor at large of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or here. You can read earlier columns here.