Trump’s BBC lawsuit coming back to bite him?
Hey, happy Wednesday. In this edition: Candace Owens, Substack, News Corp, Rebel Wilson, Meta and stupendous World Cup ratings…
When President Trump filed suit against the BBC last year, he demanded $10 billion in damages. His lawyers justified that eye-watering amount by saying the BBC documentary in question injured his reputation by “defamatorily” portraying him “as a violent insurrectionist.”
The brief bad edit in the BBC documentary — which didn’t air in the US — caused “massive economic damage to his brand value and significant damage and injury to his future financial prospects,” the lawyers argued, citing “direct harm” to his “businesses.”
For the BBC, those hard-to-believe, hard-to-prove claims were an opening. The BBC’s lawyers pushed for access to Trump’s financial records — access that countless reporters have unsuccessfully sought over the years. And yesterday they scored a victory (for now).
A federal magistrate judge said yes, the BBC must be able to obtain those records as part of the pre-trial discovery process.
Trump’s brand and businesses are “said to have been impugned. Reputational, economic damages, all of that is now at issue in this case,” US Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett said after a hearing in Miami.
Politico reporter Josh Gerstein, who was there, said “the hearing could serve as a reminder to Trump that the headline-grabbing lawsuits he’s fond of filing against media outlets are a two-way street, giving the press added leverage to pry into his business dealings and controversial episodes he might prefer to consign to history.”
This development was treated as big news by the British papers. “Trump forced to turn over financial records in BBC case,” The Telegraph wrote. “Trump’s revenge lawsuit just hit a snag — and the BBC knows how to capitalize,” The i Paper wrote.
But there’s a big asterisk. “Trump can appeal the ruling to U.S. District Court Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee,” Gerstein noted.
Altman has yet to rule on the BBC’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit altogether.
During yesterday’s hearing, Trump attorney Alejandro Brito tried to stave off the BBC’s deep-dive into the president’s businesses.
Per Gerstein, “Brito told Lett the president’s approach to the case has ‘evolved’ and he is now pursuing only damage to his reputation — not his businesses,” but BBC attorney Chuck Tobin responded, “He ran for president of the United States on a platform of the art of the deal. You cannot separate the man and his reputation from his operation of his businesses.”
The judge ruled based on the text of the lawsuit, not on a potential rewriting of the lawsuit.
Brito did not respond to my request for comment this morning, but a further legal tug-of-war looks likely.
In many different ways, the BBC’s lawyers are “trying to make it more painful for the president to continue with the litigation,” Gerstein wrote. For example, “the BBC is pressing for Trump to answer the network’s questions under oath.”
Tobin told the court yesterday that they’re “dragging their feet on giving me a date for the president’s deposition.”
At the core of any such deposition would be Trump’s conduct on January 6, 2021.
This morning CNN’s Jake Tapper is out with this authoritative look at “the false claims, chaos and coverups behind the Trump administration’s killing of two American citizens” in Minnesota last January.
Our colleague Aaron Blake says the article “describes an epidemic of lying – from the lowest levels of government to the top. It’s truly breathtaking.” Check it out for yourself here.
“Now that the case has been unsealed,” the public can see that “the Trump administration’s Air Force One leak investigation targeting The New York Times is encountering severe turbulence,” TPM’s David Kurtz writes ahead of tomorrow afternoon’s hearing about the subpoenas.
Kurtz says the Justice Department has “admitted to serious errors in how it has handled the case so far,” which “reinforces what was obvious from the get-go: This isn’t about nabbing leakers (or not solely about that); it’s about retaliating against the NYT.”
TheRighting’s Howard Polskin gave us an exclusive first look at quarterly research he’ll publish today about right-wing podcasts. Polskin says Candace Owens’ show ranks as the fastest-growing such podcast year over year but, at the same time, “her growth is slowing dramatically quarter to quarter,” according to his data.
Owens grotesquely gained lots of new listeners by sowing conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s death, among other subjects, but TheRighting’s analysis suggests Owens has hit a natural ceiling, at least for now…
I love this move by Substack. The platform says it is fighting “soulless slop” on the internet by giving users access to a new feature created with Pangram, an AI-detection startup, “to scan text to see how much of it was likely written by hand or with AI assistance.”
“It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet,” co-founder and CEO Chris Best wrote, so Substack is taking action because its business depends on trust between writers and readers.
BI’s Peter Kafka notes that Best “takes pains to say Substack isn’t opposed to the use of AI in general or in the creation of Substack content,” but that the company recognizes its users are worried about AI. “And there will be money and opportunity in giving people places where it isn’t…”
News Corp has announced “that it is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine with an AI sidebar tool that plugs into large language models,” Semafor’s Max Tani reports.
And there’s this: “Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has given her final approval to the landmark $1.5 billion settlement in the class action lawsuit brought against Anthropic in 2024 for engaging in copyright infringement to build its large language models,” Publishers Weekly’s Jim Milliot writes.
Yes, Martínez-Olguín is the same judge assigned to the Paramount case…
“Employees at Paramount Skydance are wrestling with whether the planned mega-merger with Warner Bros. Discovery would put them on the chopping block or help save their jobs,” Business Insider’s James Faris reports.
But first, there’s the August 3 preliminary injunction hearing in front of Martínez-Olguín. Puck’s Eriq Gardner says both sides have ”reason to feel encouraged” since “she credited the structural case without yet foreclosing a factual rebuttal.”
If Paramount’s arguments fail and Martínez-Olguín issues an injunction, “Paramount can still take comfort in the calendar,” Gardner says. “The accelerated timetable leaves enough runway to seek emergency appellate review before the dreaded ticking fee begins to bite in the fourth quarter.”
Before all that, Paramount still needs the OK from EU regulators. Today is the deadline for the European Commission to make a decision. Remember that Paramount offered concessions, including exiting an international distribution joint venture with Universal over competition concerns from EU theater operators. The company has said it’s “confident” this remedy would be enough to get the approval.
A commission spokesperson has not responded to my request for comment about the status of the review.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, the editorial board echoes the widespread conservative argument that the state AGs’ “larger goal is to deny Paramount CEO David Ellison control of Warner’s CNN news channel. Antitrust is their political weapon of choice.”
The editorial board then worked in a jab at Paramount–Warner’s business challenge: “The combined company would also have a monumental debt load. It may be a bad business deal, but bad antitrust policy is no reason to stop it.”
Last weekend, I wrote about a standout local news source in Bloomington, Indiana, that was basically kicked off Facebook by an AI system and was told the decision couldn’t be reversed. Here’s some good news: The decision was reversed, and The Bloomingtonian is back on Facebook, though its account was demonetized and its paying subscribers are gone.
“This entire experience has been exhausting,” editor Jeremy Hogan wrote.
The NYT’s Stuart A. Thompson and Eli Tan are out with a new story about these problems. “Users have organized online, with more than 60,000 recently signing a petition asking Meta to provide more information about account bans and to let humans review appeals,” they write.
The NYT followed up about several specific cases and got results…
Yesterday’s round of layoffs extended far beyond ESPN to other parts of Disney, including ABC News.
Pixar and Nat Geo were “among the divisions most affected,” Deadline’s Dade Hayes reports. “About a dozen ABC News staffers have been impacted…”
And they’re stupendous. “Sunday’s Spain–Argentina FIFA World Cup Final averaged a combined 66.4 million viewers across Fox (42.5 million) and Telemundo (23.9 million)… marking television’s largest audience, excluding NFL games and news events, since the series finale of ‘Seinfeld’ in 1998,” Jon Lewis writes for Sports Media Watch.
Looking at the overall ratings for the entire tournament, “the first North American World Cup in 32 years was the biggest viewership hit in the history of soccer on American television,” Lewis adds…
🇫🇷France: French lawmakers have Tuesday “to ban social media use for children under the age of 15, making it the first country in the European Union to introduce such an age limit,” CNN’s Joseph Ataman reports.
🇬🇧United Kingdom: “Despite new Prime Minister Andy Burnham undergoing an extensive cabinet reshuffle, incumbent culture minister Lisa Nandy is set to remain in post,” Variety’s K.J. Yossman writes.
🇦🇺Australia: Rebel Wilson “has successfully defended claims she defamed a young actress who played the lead role in her directorial debut.” CNN’s Hilary Whiteman has the full story here.
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.