Trump sues Des Moines Register newspaper over ‘election interference’ | Media News
The US president-elect’s lawsuit comes days after a defamation settlement was reached with ABC News.
US President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit accusing a newspaper and polling firm of engaging in “brazen election interference” by publishing a pre-election poll underestimated his popularity.
The lawsuit, filed late Monday, accuses The Des Moines Register newspaper, its parent company Gannett and pollster Ann Selzer of intentionally downplaying Trump’s support in a poll that showed him trailing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
The Nov. 2 poll, which showed Harris leading Iowa by three percentage points, drew widespread attention as Trump easily carried the Midwestern state in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Trump won Iowa by more than 13 percentage points in last month’s presidential election.
“Selzer’s electoral malpractice was not an astonishing coincidence – it was intentional,” says the lawsuit filed in Polk County, Iowa. “As President Trump remarked, ‘She knew exactly what she was doing.'”
The lawsuit, which bases its claims on alleged violations of Iowa’s consumer fraud law, seeks three times the damages assessed by a jury.
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokeswoman for The Des Moines Register, said the newspaper stands behind its reporting and considers the lawsuit to be without merit.
“We acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register primary poll did not reflect the final margin of President Trump’s victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographic data, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, and a technical analysis statement Pollster Ann Selzer,” Anton said.
Selzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said in an interview with PBS last week that she wondered why anyone would think she designed the survey to produce a particular result.
Trump’s lawsuit comes just days later ABC News agreed to a settlement In a defamation case, he brought up anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate claim that he was held civilly liable for rape.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil rights organization, condemned the lawsuit as a “direct attack” on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to free speech.
“When newspapers and pollsters are sued for ‘deceptive practices’ because they publish stories and poll results that politicians don’t like, the First Amendment rights of all media outlets are threatened. A false poll does not constitute election interference or voter fraud,” the group said.
Trump, who is too is suing CBS News over an interview with Harris that he claims was misleadingly edited, faces major legal hurdles to winning his lawsuits as U.S. speech protections are among the strongest in the world.
Still, the lawsuits could cause difficulties for news organizations by exposing potentially embarrassing internal communications and subjecting journalists and executives to sworn depositions.