A second lawsuit against the Des Moines Register may be frivolous — but it raises media trust issues that aren’t going away any time soon

Last month, Donald Trump sued the Des Moines Register and established pollster J. Ann Selzer for the epically off Iowa Poll predicting a Kamala Harris win in the state, ringing another warning bell for the incumbent president’s intimidation of the press.

Now, a second lawsuit has been filed in Iowa District Court against the same parties — the Register, Selzer, and Gannett — by a different plaintiff. Des Moines Register subscriber Dennis Donnelly, through the conservative nonprofit law firm the Center for American Rights, sued the defendants for fraud in a putative class action lawsuit on behalf of subscribers. (In the last few months, the Center for American Rights also filed an FCC complaint against NBC for featuring Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live and filed FCC and FEC complaints about ABC News’ “debate bias” against Trump, among other things.)

The lawsuit claims that subscriber Donnelly was “intensely frustrated by the inaccurate poll and felt like the Register was disservicing him and other readers when it ran and when its results were compared to the final outcome.” The poll allegedly “gave him a false impression of the state of the world as he thought about voting and discussed voting and politics with friends and neighbors.” The counts, specifically, are one apiece of fraudulent misrepresentation or reckless negligent misrepresentation; consumer fraud; professional malpractice; and interference with the right to vote. Donnelly is asking for one year’s compensation for his now-digital Register subscription ($69.99). (“In recent years he switched from a print subscription to a digital subscription” — in this, at least, Donnelly is representative of a trend among American news consumers.)

The Donnelly lawsuit’s rhetoric has a familiar Trumpian bombast, and trots out both typical and more tailored rightwing attack lines against mainstream media (The Register “promised subscribers like Dennis Donnelly that it would provide trustworthy news, and instead it delivered the dictionary definition of fake news”; “No one saw this coming because it wasn’t coming. It was wrong. Flat-out, epically, recklessly wrong.”; “They say close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. This wasn’t even close to close.”). The suit essentially amounts to an argument that the poll was so wildly off that, whether deliberate or negligent, it meets the “actual malice” standard and the parties behind it must pay: “A miss by 16 points is not an innocent error — it is either intentional fraud or reckless disregard for accuracy. Either way it is actionable.” (The suit claims the odds of this miss are “one time in 3.5 million trials,” per James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.)

In a public statement, FIRE attorneys representing Selzer described the lawsuit as “the very definition of a ‘SLAPP’ suit — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” SLAPP lawsuits, which can quickly drain the coffers of local outlets, are on the rise.

Nick Klinefeldt, counsel for the Register, called it a “frivolous, copy-cat lawsuit” that’s “the latest in disturbing attempts to pervert consumer protection laws to suppress political speech protected by the First Amendment.”

“Although the results of the poll were unexpected, they were in no way fraudulent or misleading to the subscribers of The Des Moines Register or anyone else,” Klinefeldt told the Register. “Indeed, to fail to report the results of the poll regardless of the election outcome would be a disservice to both our readers and the general public. The Des Moines Register and Gannett will vigorously defend this baseless lawsuit in order to stand up for speech protected by the First Amendment.” (Before either lawsuit was filed, Selzer and the Register reckoned publicly with the big miss.)

What surprised me, reading through the filing, were the echoes of reasonable critiques of the media. Though co-opted, distorted, and weaponized for partisan purposes here, threads running through the case reflect the ways many Americans feel alienated by and distrustful of the press, polls, and experts. Nathan Heller wrote in The New Yorker about Republicans’ victory in 2024 controlling the “ambience of information.” In this lawsuit, some of the “big, sloppy notions” about the flaws of media ring true, even if the lawsuit is frivolous.

Here are a few of the key themes that stood out to me:

Distrust of polls, specifically as clickbait:

From page 34 of the suit:

Zooming out further, there’s long been legitimate debate about the potential consequences of polling for public trust in media (especially since Trumpian politics set off an earthquake for political polling in 2016). In particular, people are not very good at interpreting statistical data, which can mean polls are confusing and not necessarily that useful to the average news consumer. Bigger questions have been raised about whether polls have consequences like suppressing voter turnout — a specter this suit also raises.

Distrust of large newspaper chains

The suit quotes Ken Paulson, a former Gannett editor and director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University (and a member of the legal advisory council at FIRE, the organization defending Selzer against this lawsuit):

We’ve reported on the scale of destruction of local news by Gannett since its merger with GateHouse.

Slamming experts — when expedient:

The lawsuit draws a distinction between the experts charged with providing trustworthy information, and the lay news consumers they serve, in order to charge the professionals with alleged misconduct:

Newsroom journalists and pollsters are professionals with white-collar jobs that expect at least a bachelor’s degree and some years of experience, if not advanced degrees in journalism, political science, or statistics (Dr. Selzer has a PhD).

Newsroom subscribers are a limited class of foreseeable third parties who rely on the information provided by these professionals.

The suit does not, however, excoriate all experts. It relies on other academic and “expert” sources, like Pew, to back up its arguments — and cites other polls as the red flags that should have given pause to Selzer and the Register team.

You can read the filing here.