this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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I guess that you're right they cant explictly say "Trump is a facist" because they will get sued but they hint at in and imply it in so many articles. Here's a quick search which shows what I mean about journalists talking about this. You could find 10+ of these types of posts from each of the big news sites.
Opinion: Trump’s praise of dictators tells us all we need to know
'It's happening right here': The authoritarian threat to American democracy
Why does Trump keep talking like a fascist? Because it works
Twelve signs Trump would try to run a fascist dictatorship in a second term
Talk of a Trump Dictatorship Charges the American Political Debate
These are good examples, but here’s the problem with them:
This is an Opinion article, not a news article. In particular, the NYT likes to hide behind these, allowing opinion writers free rein while hedging and minimizing and normalizing the candidate in all the actual News articles.
Likewise this is an interview with an author, not a news article.
Another ‘editorial’, and Maddow is pretty great but sort of preaching to the choir. Not news reporting as such.
Another Opinion piece, they even preface the author with “Perspective by” to distance themselves from it.
This is the only actual news article of the bunch, and it is largely based on trumps famous ‘i’d be a dictator on the first day’ quote which was unfuckingbelievably outrageous in its own right. It’s probably worthy of a breakdown but I’d have to get past the paywall first. Also to note it’s on page 23 of the A section, not exactly front page anyway.
I'd be curious to see how libel and slander laws would apply to accuse a former president and presidential candidate of being a fascist
Journalists have incredibly broad protections against getting sued for saying something like that. In general, for public or political figures, they can say whatever they want, in a way they never could against a private citizen, for exactly this reason.
There are fuzzy cases at the edges (like Bob Murray suing John Oliver), but Trump is so clearly a public figure that he can't sue them for libel without getting laughed out of court. This is why he keeps bitching periodically about the libel laws and how we have to fix them; because they protect people's right to talk about him and he hates that they can do that and he can't punish them for it.