Even as major media organizations like ABC’s parent company, Disney, and CBS’s, Paramount, were settling bogus lawsuits filed by Donald Trump in order to demonstrate their submissiveness, an unlikely defender of the First Amendment has emerged: USA Today Co., which until earlier this week was known as Gannett.
A federal judge on Thursday threw out a class-action lawsuit charging that Gannett’s Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer committed fraud when they reported days before the 2024 election that Kamala Harris held a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa. As you may recall, the poll results created a sensation, but they turned out to be wrong: Trump won Iowa by 13 points, which was about what you’d expect.
The class-action suit was brought by a resident of West Des Moines named Dennis Donnelly, who claimed that he and other Register subscribers were victims of fraud because the Register acted with “intentional deceit or reckless disregard,” according to Emma Brustkern of WFAA-TV.
The suit is similar to one brought by Trump himself against Gannett, the Register and Selzer (he later dropped Selzer from the claim), calling the poll “brazen election interference.” That is, of course, a ridiculous allegation. More than anything, pollsters want to get it right, but sometimes they get it wrong. And sometimes, as in the case of Selzer in 2024, they get it very wrong. As U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger writes in her decision:
No false representation was made. Defendants conducted a poll using a particular methodology which yielded results that later turned out to be different from the event the poll sought to measure. The results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false represention merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.
Trump’s own lawsuit is likely to meet a similar fate. So good for USA Today Co., which has shown a stiffer spine than some other media companies. Rather than allowing itself to be used by the Trump regime as a way of weakening the First Amendment, it is standing up to authoritarianism.