Last month, Donald Trump sued the Des Moines Register and established pollster J. Ann Selzer for the epically off Iowa Poll predicting a Kamala Harris win in the state, ringing another warning bell for the incumbent president’s intimidation of the press.

Now, a second lawsuit has been filed in Iowa District Court against the same parties — the Register, Selzer, and Gannett — by a different plaintiff. Des Moines Register subscriber Dennis Donnelly, through the conservative nonprofit law firm the Center for American Rights, sued the defendants for fraud in a putative class action lawsuit on behalf of subscribers. (In the last few months, the Center for American Rights also filed an FCC complaint against NBC for featuring Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live and filed FCC and FEC complaints about ABC News’ “debate bias” against Trump, among other things.)

The lawsuit claims that subscriber Donnelly was “intensely frustrated by the inaccurate poll and felt like the Register was disservicing him and other readers when it ran and when its results were compared to the final outcome.” The poll allegedly “gave him a false impression of the state of the world as he thought about voting and discussed voting and politics with friends and neighbors.” The counts, specifically, are one apiece of fraudulent misrepresentation or reckless negligent misrepresentation; consumer fraud; professional malpractice; and interference with the right to vote. Donnelly is asking for one year’s compensation for his now-digital Register subscription ($69.99). (“In recent years he switched from a print subscription to a digital subscription” — in this, at least, Donnelly is representative of a trend among American news consumers.)

The Donnelly lawsuit’s rhetoric has a familiar Trumpian bombast, and trots out both typical and more tailored rightwing attack lines against mainstream media (The Register “promised subscribers like Dennis Donnelly that it would provide trustworthy news, and instead it delivered the dictionary definition of fake news”; “No one saw this coming because it wasn’t coming. It was wrong. Flat-out, epically, recklessly wrong.”; “They say close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. This wasn’t even close to close.”). The suit essentially amounts to an argument that the poll was so wildly off that, whether deliberate or negligent, it meets the “actual malice” standard and the parties behind it must pay: “A miss by 16 points is not an innocent error — it is either intentional fraud or reckless disregard for accuracy. Either way it is actionable.” (The suit claims the odds of this miss are “one time in 3.5 million trials,” per James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.)

In a public statement, FIRE attorneys representing Selzer described the lawsuit as “the very definition of a ‘SLAPP’ suit — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.” SLAPP lawsuits, which can quickly drain the coffers of local news outlets, are on the rise.

Nick Klinefeldt, counsel for the Register, called it a “frivolous, copy-cat lawsuit” that’s “the latest in disturbing attempts to pervert consumer protection laws to suppress political speech protected by the First Amendment.”

“Although the results of the poll were unexpected, they were in no way fraudulent or misleading to the subscribers of The Des Moines Register or anyone else,” Klinefeldt told the Register. “Indeed, to fail to report the results of the poll regardless of the election outcome would be a disservice to both our readers and the general public. The Des Moines Register and Gannett will vigorously defend this baseless lawsuit in order to stand up for speech protected by the First Amendment.”

(Before either lawsuit was filed, Selzer and the Register reckoned publicly with the big miss. Polling outliers could be more obvious prior to the 1990s, when elections were less close, said Jessica Hullman, a professor of computer science at Northwestern who has contributed to research on how probabilistic forecasts of presidential elections are communicated to the public. But regarding Selzer’s poll, “it’s possible various forms of bias that have become more challenging in recent elections, like differential non-response where people in some parties are harder to reach with polls than others, combined with the possibility of getting a bad sample purely by chance, would result in an outlier of around this size without any malintention or wrongdoing on her part,” she noted.)

What surprised me, reading through the filing, were the occasional echoes of reasonable critiques of the media. Though co-opted, distorted, and weaponized for partisan purposes here, threads running through the case reflect the ways many Americans feel alienated by and distrustful of the press, polls, and experts. Nathan Heller wrote in The New Yorker about Republicans’ victory in 2024 controlling the “ambience of information.” In this lawsuit, some of the “big, sloppy notions” about sources of media distrust ring true, even if the lawsuit is frivolous.

Here are a few of the key themes that stood out to me:

Distrust of polls, specifically as clickbait

From page 34 of the suit:

The American people do not trust the news media — according to the Pew Research Center, only 31 percent of the American people have a great deal or fair amount of faith in the news media. That loss of faith in these important institutions is because news outlets like the Register publish obviously incorrect information and then trumpet it to get ‘clicks.’ Deterrence is necessary to restore faith in the media by providing a strong disincentive to intentionally or recklessly push stories that are inaccurate but would generate significant public attention and coverage from other media.

There’s long been legitimate debate about the potential consequences of polling for public trust in media (especially since Trumpian politics set off an earthquake for political polling in 2016). Bigger questions have been raised about whether polls can have consequences like affecting voter turnout — a specter this suit also raises.

In particular, people are not very good at interpreting statistical data, which means polls can be confusing and easily misunderstood by the average news consumer. “Many people still want to be able to look to a single poll for a read on what will happen, but that’s not realistic,” Hullman said. “There’s always the chance of getting a bad draw simply from chance.” (She does not believe stopping polling altogether is the answer; “Pollsters and news agencies should, if anything, put less weight on singular polls and do a better job of educating readers about what’s unpredictable when it comes to sources of error.”)

“Because of the realities of bias and error, polls are best considered in aggregate and over time,” Hullman said. “Sometimes people want more from [polls] than they can provide.”

Whatever their flaws and limitations, polls typically generate heavy traffic during election cycles. The lawsuit repeatedly emphasizes that “the Register released [the poll] as a banner headline” that “brought in hundreds of thousands of ‘clicks’ from across the world….the misinformation was published and pushed as a banner headline with the intention to sell newspapers, sell digital passes and subscriptions, and generate ‘clicks’ that resulted in ad revenue for the Register.” That framing plays into public distrust of the incentive structures of for-profit media.

Distrust of large newspaper chains

The suit quotes Ken Paulson, a former Gannett editor and director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University (and a member of the legal advisory council at FIRE, the organization defending Selzer against this lawsuit):

A company culture can change pretty dramatically when a business is sold. New Media Investment Group (nee GateHouse) acquired Gannett in 2019. It kept the name, but not the values or most of the employees.

We’ve reported on the scale of destruction of local news by Gannett since its merger with GateHouse.

Slamming experts — when expedient

The lawsuit draws a distinction between the experts charged with providing trustworthy information, and the lay news consumers they serve, in order to charge the professionals with alleged misconduct:

Newsroom journalists and pollsters are professionals with white-collar jobs that expect at least a bachelor’s degree and some years of experience, if not advanced degrees in journalism, political science, or statistics (Dr. Selzer has a PhD).

Newsroom subscribers are a limited class of foreseeable third parties who rely on the information provided by these professionals.

The suit does not, however, excoriate all experts. It relies on other academic and “expert” sources, like Pew, to back up its arguments — and cites other polls as the red flags that it claims should have given pause to Selzer and the Register team.

You can read the filing here.

This story was updated with comments from Jessica Hullman received after publication.

The wildfires in Los Angeles have killed at least 24 people and destroyed more than 12,000 homes and other structures in the last week. And it’s not over yet. Firefighters struggling to contain the Eaton, Palisades, and other blazes will face a “particularly dangerous situation” over the next few days as winds pick up, according to the National Weather Service, which issued a rare “most severe” warning on Monday morning.

From the beginning of the crisis, the L.A. Times has made its wildfire coverage free. The newspaper saw record-breaking readership with traffic to the website peaking on Wednesday, Jan. 8 — the day after the fires began, a Times spokesperson confirmed. Overall, traffic was up 800% from the past 30-day average and new subscriptions were up over 259% compared to that same period. (The Times declined to share absolute numbers of subscribers gained.) The Times estimates that lifting the paywall on all wildfire-related stories resulted in a 45% lower subscriber conversion rate.

The L.A. Times entered the new year with about 650,000 paid readers — a figure that combines print, digital, and third-party platforms like Apple News — including 275,000 direct digital subscribers. (An estimated 20,000 subscribers canceled over its decision to not endorse in the 2024 presidential race.) L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong announced in December that getting 400,000 direct digital subscriptions — representing about 1% of California’s 40 million residents — is a primary goal for the newsroom.

The Times had its “most subscriber visits ever” on January 8. And readers stuck around. Site recirculation — when readers come to the L.A. Times site for one story and then stay to read other coverage — was up 1,500% compared to the previous month-long average. Video coverage, in particular, did well with video plays up by 1,800% compared to the previous month.

The top two stories — both unpaywalled — were the main coverage from the fire’s first days “Fast-moving fires in Pacific Palisades, Altadena, Pasadena and Sylmar prompt evacuations, school closures” and the explainer “Fire hydrants ran dry as Pacific Palisades burned. L.A. city officials blame ‘tremendous demand'”.

Honestly just go look at LATimes and get facts on the fires. Actual, usable facts. Hundreds of journalists have been reporting (+ evacuating/surviving), publishing stories by the minute, verifying facts. Do you know what that means? Type this in a browser: https://t.co/p7EOrYjoRa

— Daniel Hernandez ✍ (@longdrivesouth) January 10, 2025

The Times is also fighting to throw cold water on misinformation as it flares up. The news org has responded quickly to evacuation alerts sent in error, published columns on false information spread by politicians, confirmed the iconic Hollywood sign had not, in fact, burned down, and addressed a callout for firefighting volunteers circulating on social media that was not as it seemed. (Some city leaders argued owner Soon-Shiong could use some fact-checking as well.)

The fires are a deeply personal story for everyone in the city — and that includes the L.A. Times newsroom, as Times communications director Vanessa Curwen noted in an email.

“We have colleagues who have lost their homes or their communities; nearly everyone knows someone who has been directly impacted; folks are under evacuation orders or without electricity or running water,” Curwen said. And still, “the newsroom continues to produce invaluable coverage of what may be the costliest wildfire disaster in U.S. history and is certainly the most destructive firestorm in L.A. history.”

Today’s front page features a story I wrote w/ @brittny_mejia + @MelissaGomez004 about Altadena – my beloved hometown – and @RaineyTime‘s story about his childhood home.

For days, @latimes journalists have disperesed across the region to cover communities they know and love. pic.twitter.com/y160jqTxh8

— Colleen Shalby (@CShalby) January 12, 2025

In the MacArthur Foundation’s hefty end-of-year announcement of $20 million in grants to revitalize local news, there was lots to absorb. The lead funder of Press Forward committed money to more than a dozen organizations, including LION (receiving $4 million), Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communications ($400,000), El Tecolote ($350,000), The Oklahoma Eagle ($350,000), and Resolve Philly ($350,000), among others.

One of those grants is going outside the United States. There’s a $330,000 award to something called the “Media Forward Fund,” which is described as “a new Press Forward-inspired pooled fund for independent journalism in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.”

Sean Harder, senior communications officer at the MacArthur Foundation, confirmed to me last month that it’s the first time “funding has gone outside the U.S.” as part of MacArthur’s contributions to local news in support of Press Forward.

He explained that Media Forward Fund representatives approached MacArthur “for advice on establishing their own local news fund in Europe.”

“As we continue to experiment and learn in these early years, we agreed to provide some one-time seed funding to get their effort started with their own regional donors/philanthropies,” Harder said. “While the U.S. will remain our focus for the local news work, we wanted to extend that limited support to what you could consider a ‘cousin’ of Press Forward abroad.”

Per MacArthur, with this $20 million round of grants, its contributions to local news via Press Forward now total more than $90 million in committed funding. In 2023, MacArthur pledged to invest at least $150 million in local news over five years as the lead funder of Press Forward.

Meta will replace its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. with a crowd-sourced community notes program similar to the one used by X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page on Tuesday morning. The wide-ranging video message framed the decision as a move to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Zuckerberg and Meta’s new global policy chief Joel Kaplan — who gave an exclusive interview to Fox News — both put blame on journalists and fact-checkers for the change.

“We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg said in the video announcement.

“We’re eliminating the third-party fact-checking system. [It was] well-intentioned at the outset, but there’s just been too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check and how,” Kaplan said from the “Fox and Friends” couch on Tuesday morning.

Kaplan added, “The idea was [that] they were independent fact-checkers, but they’ve just been too biased.”

Zuckerberg and Kaplan did not provide examples of the fact-checks they thought were biased or elaborate on how they think fact-checkers have destroyed trust. In a Facebook blog post, Kaplan wrote, “Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives…Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate.”

As recently as 2022, Meta was bragging that it had invested more than $100 million into fact-checking. But there have been signs the company has been looking to cut back on independent fact-checking. The Associated Press confirmed its fact-checking agreement with Meta ended back January 2024. The site factcheck.org — which lists its donors and grants publicly — saw its funding from Meta drop from $339,279 in 2023 to $162,800 in 2024.

Though news organizations have sought to turn fact-checking into a reliable revenue stream, the consensus has been that there are few buyers outside a handful of Big Tech companies. In 2022, Meta provided nearly half — 45.2% — of total funding for fact-checking, according to Poynter. (Poynter is home to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) as well as Politifact — one of the 10 fact-checking partners in the U.S. affected by the announcement.) Meta’s fact-checking program has been the leading income source for fact-checking organizations that participate in it, according to a State of the Fact-Checkers Report released April 2024.

The fact-checking field, which experienced rapid growth for nearly 15 years, began to level off in 2021, according to the Duke Reporters’ Lab, which has produced an annual census of fact-checkers since 2014. Two years later, in 2023, fact-checking teams declined for the first time.

“Our latest count showed as many as 457 fact-checking projects in 111 countries were active over the past two years,” the Duke report notes. “But so far in 2024, that number has shrunk to 439.”

Despite some of these warning signs, Meta scrapping the fact-checking operation entirely in the U.S. — and suggesting it would do the same in additional countries — was a surprise to many.

A spokesperson for the Agence France-Presse (AFP) — a long-time partner of Facebook that runs the world’s biggest network of fact-checkers — said the news organization learned the news on Tuesday as everyone else.

“It’s a hard hit for the fact-checking community and journalism,” AFP said in a statement. “We’re assessing the situation.”

Other partners pushed back on some of the critical statements Meta executives made in announcing the end of the fact-checking program. Maarten Schenk, co-founder and chief operating officer of Lead Stories, said the fact-checking site has been part of the Meta Third-Party Fact-Checking Partnership since 2019. The organization was “surprised and disappointed” to first learn about the end of the partnership through media reports.

“In all the years we have been part of the partnership, we or the IFCN never received any complaints from Meta about any political bias, so we were quite surprised by this statement,” Schenk noted.

Angie Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network and a 2023 Nieman fellow, said Meta’s decision “will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information.”

“Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts; it’s added information and context to controversial claims, and it’s debunked hoax content and conspiracy theories,” Holan said in a statement. “The fact-checkers used by Meta follow a Code of Principles requiring nonpartisanship and transparency. It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters. Fact-checkers have not been biased in their work — that attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”

Aaron Sharockman, executive director of PolitiFact, said in a statement that the “decision has nothing to do with free speech or censorship.”

.@PolitiFact will have more to say on this. But these are my thoughts. This decision has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. (PolitiFact is an original partner and has been working on this project for 8+ years). https://t.co/NjydINtNlf pic.twitter.com/OzL2UwUtmX

— Aaron Sharockman (@asharock) January 7, 2025

The European Fact-Checking Standards Network also took issue with Zuckerberg’s justification for ending the U.S. program and called his statements “patently false.”

“Fact-checkers are held to the highest journalistic standards of non-biased reporting, transparency, integrity and accountability, with organisations like the EFCSN upholding these standards through an independently conducted audit,” the EFCSN wrote in a press release. “Linking fact-checking with censorship is especially harmful as such false claims are already one of the driving forces behind harassment and attacks on fact-checkers.”

Meta also announced Tuesday that it plans to loosen its filters that automatically flag certain offensive speech and recommend more political news.

“[The rules have] just become too restrictive over time about what people can say, including about those kind of sensitive topics … that people want to discuss and debate — immigration, trans issues, gender,” Kaplan said. “If you can say it on TV, if you can say it on the floor of Congress, [then] you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.” (Wired reported that the updated “hateful conduct” policy now allows users to say gay and trans people have “mental illness” and permits referring to “women as household objects or property.”)

In his own video, Zuckerberg said Meta has started to “get feedback that people want to see [political] content again.”

“For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts,” he said, “but it feels like we’re in a new era now.”