By Chris Roberts
It’s news when a former president sues his opponent, and in March 2022 news organizations such as FoxNews.com placed at the top of their website the news that Donald Trump filed a $100 million lawsuit claiming that his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, were among those part of a conspiracy “to create a narrative that he and his 2016 presidential campaign were colluding with Russia.”
So it follows that what happens to the lawsuit also is news. And Fox News, like others, reported in September 2022 that a judge tossed the lawsuit. Judge Donald Middlebrooks wrote that Trump’s lawsuit was “not attempting to seek redress for any legal harm,” but instead “seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him, and this Court is not the appropriate forum.”
Even bigger news is when a plaintiff is sanctioned $1 million for filing a lawsuit – and bigger still when the plaintiff is a former president of the United States.
That happened – Middlebrooks (appointed by former President Bill Clinton) fined former President Trump and his lawyers nearly $1 million for filing a lawsuit that “should never have been brought.” That was reported on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, by the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, the conservative-but-tiny Newsmax, the right-leaning Washington Times, and hundreds of other news organizations.
But not Fox News.com.
As of this writing – almost 24 hours after the story broke and Judge Middlebrooks’s order was posted online – the nation’s most important conservative news organization has not mentioned the fine for what the judge called a lawsuit that was “completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.” (Maybe this will change, but it’s not anywhere as of 2 p.m. CDT on Jan. 20, 2023, in the Donald Trump category at FoxNews.com.)
Since news of the fine broke, Fox.com posted a story about an action in a different Trump lawsuit. Fox reported that the former president dropped a Florida lawsuit claiming abuse by New York’s attorney general, Letita James, who is continuing to pursue investigations into Trump’s personal and business activities.
The story doesn’t mention the $1 million penalty for suing Clinton. To know that on FoxNews.com, you have to read the comments under the Trump/James story: That Middlebrooks also was assigned the James lawsuit, and it’s likely the James lawsuit was dropped because it could well be seen as another “revenge” lawsuit.
The bottom line: You won’t understand the world by cloistering yourself in a single worldview. And news organizations that will not fully report news can’t be trusted, if you believe that trust in news organizations should be defined by the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics’ reminder that journalists have the moral obligation to “Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.”