Trump v. Selzer Likely Going Nowhere

Monday’s Complaint in this case essentially alleges that pollster Ann Selzer’s Nov. 2 poll for the Des Moines Register, which showed Harris ahead in Iowa by 3 points, was deceptive to consumers and thus violated Iowa consumer fraud law:

62. President Trump, together with all Iowa and American voters, is a “consumer” within the meaning of the statute.

63. Defendants furnished “merchandise” to consumers within the broad meaning of the statute since they provided a service: physical newspapers, online newspapers, and other content that contained the Harris Poll.

64. Defendants engaged in “deception” because the Harris Poll was “likely to mislead a substantial number of consumers as to a material fact or facts,” to wit: the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race.

65. Defendants engaged in an “unfair act or practice” because the publication and release of the Harris Poll “cause[d] substantial, unavoidable injury to consumers that [was] not outweighed by any consumer or competitive benefits which the practice produced,” to wit: consumers, including Plaintiff, were badly deceived and misled as to the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race. Moreover, President Trump, the Trump 2024 Campaign, and other Republicans were forced to divert enormous campaign and financial resources to Iowa based on the deceptive Harris Poll. Consumers within Iowa who paid for subscriptions to the Des Moines Register or who otherwise purchased the publication were also badly deceived. Additionally, Iowans who contributed to the Trump 2024 Campaign were similarly deceived.

66. The Harris Poll was deceptive and misleading, unfair, and the result of concealment, suppression, and omission of material facts about the true respective positions of President Trump and Harris in the Presidential race, all of which were known to Defendants and should have been disclosed to the public.

67. Moreover, as demonstrated by the leak of the Harris Poll before publication in the Register Article, Defendants created, published, and released the Harris Poll for the improper purpose of deceptively influencing the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election….

I’m far from sure that, as a statutory matter, the Iowa consumer fraud law should be interpreted as applying to allegedly deceptive informational content of a newspaper, untethered to attempts to sell some other product. But in any event, the First Amendment generally bars states from imposing liability for misleading or even outright false political speech, including in commercially distributed newspapers—and especially for predictive and evaluative judgments of the sort inherent in estimating public sentiment about a candidate. To quote the Washington Court of Appeals in WASHLITE v. Fox News, where plaintiff unsuccessfully sued Fox for allegedly false statements about COVID,

[T]he Supreme Court in U.S. v. Alvarez (2012) disavowed the principle that false expressions in general receive a lesser degree of constitutional protections simply by virtue of being false. The court stated that its precedent restricting the value or protections afforded objectively false statements

all derive from cases discussing defamation, fraud, or some other legally cognizable harm associated with a false statement, such as an invasion of privacy or the costs of vexatious litigation. In those decisions the falsity of the speech at issue was not irrelevant to our analysis, but neither was it determinative. The Court has never endorsed the categorical rule the Government advances: that false statements receive no First Amendment protection.

The court went on to explain that,

[w]ere the Court to hold that the interest in truthful discourse alone is sufficient to sustain a ban on speech, absent any evidence that the speech was used to gain a material advantage, it would give government a broad censorial power unprecedented in this Court’s cases or in our constitutional tradition.

WASHLITE’s allegations that the challenged statements are false and recklessly made simply cannot overcome the protections afforded speech on matters of public concern under the First Amendment, even in the face of the State’s undoubtedly compelling interest in the public dissemination of accurate information regarding threats to public health.

The First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not extend only to categories of speech that survive an ad hoc balancing of relative social costs and benefits. The First Amendment itself reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions on the Government outweigh the costs. Our Constitution forecloses any attempt to revise that judgment simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.

United States v. Stevens (2010).

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” Texas v. Johnson (1989). Although WASHLITE pursues the meritorious goal of ensuring that the public receives accurate information about the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenged statements do not fall within the narrow exceptions to the First Amendment’s protections. We affirm the trial court’s conclusion that, however laudable WASHLITE’s intent, its CPA claim is barred by the First Amendment.

The same logic applies here, I think. To be sure, as WASHLITE and Alvarez noted, there are some historically recognized exceptions to First Amendment protection for knowing falsehoods, such as for defamation, fraud, and perjury. But those are deliberately exceptions. Defamation is limited to knowing (or sometimes negligent) falsehoods that damage a particular person’s reputation. Fraud is limited to statements that themselves request money or other tangibly valuable items. Perjury is limited to lies under oath in governmental proceedings. There is no general government power to punish political falsehoods outside these narrow exceptions.

In addition to the Alvarez plurality statements cited by the Washington court, note that five Justices and three dissenting Justices in Alvarez agreed that

[T]here are broad areas in which any attempt by the state to penalize purportedly false speech would present a grave and unacceptable danger of suppressing truthful speech…. Laws restricting false statements about philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and the like raise such concerns, and in many contexts have called for strict scrutiny. But this case does not involve such a law.

That’s from Justice Breyer’s two-Justice concurrence, but Justice Alito’s three-Justice dissent took the same view, adding “The point is not that there is no such thing as truth or falsity in these areas or that the truth is always impossible to ascertain, but rather that it is perilous to permit the state to be the arbiter of truth.” I think this logic applies to media decisions about how to predict the likely results of an election (again, outside the narrow exceptions noted above). And while some old decisions have upheld state laws focused on knowing falsehoods in election campaigns, post-Alvarez state and federal appellate cases have struck down even such specially targeted laws.

I should note that, when it comes to over-the-air broadcasting, the Court has left the Federal Communications Commission more latitude to restrict speech than the government has with regard to books, films, the Internet, and even cable television. Thus, the Court has upheld the Fairness Doctrine and the ban on broadcasting certain vulgarities. Lower courts have likewise allowed some policing by the FCC of alleged “distortion,” see, e.g., Serafyn v. FCC (D.C. Cir. 1998). And the FCC has a specific “broadcast hoaxes rules” barring the publication of knowingly “false information concerning a crime or a catastrophe,” if the information foreseeably “cause[s] substantial public harm.”

But fortunately, in recent years the FCC has recognized the dangers of policing speech this way, whether in the service of trying to restrict disfavored views or supposed misinformation. The case involving the Washington Redskins is one example; the FCC there recognized that the Court’s decision upholding the viewpoint-neutral restrictions on sex- and excretion-related vulgarities in Pacifica couldn’t be extended to allegedly bigoted words, which would be punished precisely because of their supposed viewpoints. The FCC commissioners’ statements quoted above support this as well, as does the FCC’s 2020 decision related to the broadcast hoaxes rule:

[T]he Commission does not—and cannot and will not—act as a self-appointed, free-roving arbiter of truth in journalism. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Free Press’s assertions regarding any lack of veracity were true, false speech enjoys some First Amendment protection, and section 326 of the Communications Act, reflecting First Amendment values, prohibits the Commission from interfering with freedom of the press or censoring broadcast communications. Accordingly, the Commission has recognized that “[b]roadcasters—not the FCC or any other government agency—are responsible for selecting the material they air” and that “our role in overseeing program content is very limited.”

On the Court, Justices Thomas and Ginsburg had also suggested that it was unsound to offer lesser First Amendment protection to broadcasting; I expect that, if the issue were to come before the Court today, Red Lion and Pacifica would at least be sharply limited and perhaps overruled altogether.

In any event, whatever the status of this special treatment of FCC regulation of over-the-air broadcasting, it has always been understood as limited to such broadcasters, and as not extending to newspapers. And even as to over-the-air broadcasting, it never been extended to allow state law to be used to restrict supposed political misinformation, including on broadcasting networks.

(Note that this post is adapted from a Nov. 1 post about Trump v. CBS Broadcasting, a case in which Trump is suing CBS over its editing of the Harris 60 Minutes interview; the analysis in both situations, I think, is quite similar.)

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