On the weekend ABC News shocked the media establishment by agreeing to pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit the president-elect filed against the network and its host George Stephanopoulos. On Monday, Trump announced that he was targeting another news outlet, this time a much smaller local newspaper: the Des Moines Register in Iowa.

Trump said he planned to sue the daily newspaper, which has around 50 journalists, and political pollster Ann Selzer. He attacked the Register and Selzer for releasing a poll days before the election showing Vice President Kamala Harris defeating Trump in Iowa by three percentage points. Trump would win Iowa by 13 points and has since said the newspaper published a “fake” poll.

“I’m not doing this because I want to,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday, announcing the possible lawsuit. “I do this because I feel like I have to.”

“When they settle down, they not only put a target on their backs, but they also put a target on the backs of smaller branches.”

Legal attacks like defamation suits are nothing new for news organizations. However, lawsuits from the rich and powerful are not as common as one might think – and that’s because they often don’t work.

Thanks to precedents that largely favor journalists in cases against those in power, many media outlets are defending their reporting and fighting the case in court, even at the expense of the organization’s finances. However, after ABC News withdrew from its own legal battle against Trump, media and legal experts fear that Trump and other powerful figures will now be emboldened to retaliate against smaller, more vulnerable news outlets over critical reporting.

“If they come to an agreement, they not only put a target on their backs, but they also put a target on the backs of smaller outlets that don’t have those kinds of legal resources,” said Seth Stern, an attorney and director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “ABC will write a $15 million check tomorrow and can write another one in six months and then they will be fine. Others don’t have this luxury. Therefore, it is unfortunate that the message was conveyed that the media can be victimized.”

Unlike ABC, smaller publications and individual journalists don’t always have an in-house legal team. Even if the allegations are ultimately dismissed or the publications prevail in court, legal fees can prove costly. A company like ABC News, which is owned by Disney, has more financial flexibility to combat such cases. Despite declining advertising revenue for TV news networks in recent years, ABC News still brought in nearly $150 million in advertising revenue in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. And legal experts also thought ABC News had a winning case.

Trump’s main argument in the lawsuit filed in March involved Stephanopoulos’s mention on the show that Trump was “responsible” for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll. A lawsuit instead found Trump civilly liable for sexual assault. Thanks to the First Amendment and other protections for news organizations, ABC had a strong defense.

Stern himself defended a Chicago newspaper against a similar accusation. In 2014, a Northwestern University professor accused of sexually abusing a student objected to a newspaper headline that described the allegations as “rape” and sued the newspaper. According to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, a judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the words “rape” and “sexual assault” were interchangeable.

Because the ABC case had many protections on its side, the decision to settle left room for speculation that the network and Disney had failed to own up to a journalistic error and were perhaps getting on “Trump’s good side” ahead of Trump’s presidency wanted. said Adam Winkler, professor of constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.

“This shows that some media companies are willing to settle defamation cases if they believe it is better for their bottom line,” Winkler said.

Typically, companies would fight such cases to protect their credibility and ability to report in the future, Winkler said. The ABC settlement gave others an incentive to mount similar legal attacks.

He said: “Traditionally, these companies don’t want to settle these types of cases for fear of encouraging other people to sue them.”

Trump’s list of lawsuits

Trump is notoriously liberal with his lawsuits against journalists and media companies of all stripes. In October, Trump filed a false advertising lawsuit against CBS News, claiming the network manipulated a “60 Minutes” segment to make Harris appear more positive in her comments. The lawsuit, filed in Texas, seeks $10 billion in damages.

In another lawsuit filed in 2022, Trump accused the Pulitzer Board of defamation for defending its decisions to award The New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on the Trump campaign’s 2016 ties to Russia. The case is not yet closed.

During his previous term, Trump also showed a willingness to attack journalists in other ways, including by using the Justice Department to monitor reporters.

“These newspapers and news outlets are easy to reach these days because everyone knows they have problems.”

For media representatives like Stern, the concern that similar libel lawsuits will be filed is much greater than for Trump. Even before the ABC settlement, he noted an increase in defamation lawsuits intended to silence critics. He pointed to an increasingly hostile environment toward media companies, in which more segments of the public would not object to a wealthy person suing a company. And then there is the general economic state of the news industry.

He is hopeful that a new bipartisan bill recently introduced in Congress can protect against some of the consequences, particularly for news publications and journalists.

“These newspapers and news outlets are easy to reach these days because everyone knows they have problems,” Stern said. “The news industry, particularly local news, is in a pretty dire financial situation. Years ago, millionaires might have said, ‘Well, I have millions, but so does the newspaper, I don’t really want to work with it.'”

“Now,” Stern said, “it’s a little different – they’re doing a different calculation.” They say, ‘I’ve got a lot more money to throw around than this struggling news network, so let me take a look at them and see what.’ happened.'”