Fox News, New York Times and more contest ruling allowing Devin Nunes to sue reporter
Attorneys for 35 news organizations asked a federal appeals court on Wednesday to reconsider a ruling that allowed Rep. Devin Nunes to sue a reporter and a magazine over a social media post that linked to a 2018 story about an Iowa farm owned by the congressman’s family.
The news organizations — including Fox News, The New York Times, Politico, some Iowa journalists and other companies — are following the lead of attorneys for the reporter, Ryan Lizza, and the magazine’s parent company, Hearst, who filed a motion this month to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals asking to hear their case in front of a full panel of judges.
An attorney who filed the new brief told The Fresno Bee that the court’s ruling allowing Nunes to sue Lizza over a tweet could affect how any person shares hyperlinks on social media, not just journalists.
“It’s how everyday people communicate — they refer people to information that people think is important — and it’s very important that we, as humans, should be able to do that,” Leita Walker, the attorney, said.
Nunes sued Lizza and Hearst in September 2019 in the Northern District Court of Iowa, claiming an article in Esquire that suggested his family’s farm relied on undocumented labor defamed him. It’s one of 10 lawsuits Nunes has filed against news organizations, media companies and critics over the past three years.
A federal judge in August 2020 dismissed Nunes’ lawsuit against Hearst, finding Lizza’s story did not defame the congressman.
A panel of three judges from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in September upheld most of the lower court’s ruling, agreeing that the story did not defame Nunes. But the panel handed down a ruling that allows Nunes to sue Lizza over a 2019 social media post on Twitter that linked to the unchanged story.
Attorneys for the news organizations wrote that the panel’s ruling differs from previous law which establishes that hyperlinking is not a form of republication and that an individual’s denial of truth prior to publication does not mean that the publisher produced a story with “actual malice.” Public figures like Nunes have to prove that stories are published with actual malice in defamation suits.
They further wrote the decision would dangerously impact journalists by “(a) exposing them to defamation liability not only for what they publish, but for what they link to as well, (b) lowering the bar for public-official and public-figure plaintiffs to plead actual malice, and (c) incentivizing meritless libel litigation by giving public-official and public-figure plaintiffs the power to effectively deter anyone from repeating a disfavored statement by filing a lawsuit denying its truth, thereby rendering any repetition a publication with actual malice.”
Neither a lawyer nor a spokesperson for Nunes responded to a request for comment. Lizza, who now works for Politico, declined to comment. Attorneys for Lizza and Hearst did not respond to a request for comment.
Lizza’s attorneys wrote in their motion for a rehearing that the court recently came to an opposite decision in a similar case, and that the ruling sets a dangerous precedent for the First Amendment.
Nunes since 2019 has sued The Washington Post twice; McClatchy, which publishes The Fresno Bee; CNN and an investigative research firm known for the so-called Steele dossier, among other groups. Many defendants in these lawsuits have been dropped or dismissed. Nunes has refiled cases or appealed several of those decisions.
Nunes’ family and its farm, NuStar Farms, are also suing Lizza in a separate case in Iowa.
These are the 35 organizations that are a part of the brief: Advance Publications, Inc.; American Public Media Group; the Associated Press; The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC; Bloomberg LP; BuzzFeed, Inc.; Art Cullen; The Daily Beast LLC; Dow Jones & Company, Inc.; Foundation for National Progress; Fox News Network, LLC; Gannett Co., Inc.; Michael Gartner; Gray Television, Inc.; Herald Publishing Company; Insider, Inc.; Iowa Capital Dispatch; The Iowa Freedom of Information Council; Lake Avenue Publishing; Los Angeles Times Communications LLC; The Media Law Resource Center, Inc.; The New York Times Company; Penske Media Corporation; POLITICO, LLC; Pro Publica, Inc.; The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press; Reuters News & Media Inc.; Star Tribune Media Company LLC; The Storm Lake Times Company; Herb Strentz; Student Publications, Inc.; Substack, Inc.; Univision Communications Inc.; Vice Media LLC; and Vox Media, LLC.
This story was originally published October 21, 2021 at 4:58 PM with the headline "Fox News, New York Times and more contest ruling allowing Devin Nunes to sue reporter."
