When Elon Musk called the New York Times “government-funded media” in February after his Department of Government Efficiency identified government media subscriptions, the storied outlet didn’t take the criticism lying down.
The Times responded on X with a bulleted statement explaining the nature of those subscriptions. After Donald Trump attacked the paper in April for a line in a story that noted how legal experts have called his CBS lawsuit “baseless,” saying the Times should be held liable for its “likely unlawful behavior,” the paper said his comments were the latest in “a long list of legal threats aimed at discouraging or penalizing independent reporting about the administration.”
The Times’ proactive approach stands in contrast to journalists who traditionally let their work stand on its own, and it underscores the shifting environment of a media business under more scrutiny than ever. While mistakes in the past may have once been relegated to a corrections section, the stakes are now much higher, with the wrong words igniting a social media frenzy, or drawing legal threats from the president.
“Letting the journalism speak for itself is an approach from a bygone era,” Patrick Healy, the Times’ assistant managing editor for trust and standards, told TheWrap. “Our audience is understandably asking really tough questions about why and how we publish what we publish — that’s fair, and I think we want to do a better job of opening up our process and how we work in that regard.”
That defense of proper journalism is critical at a time when mistakes can have devastating consequences. The BBC’s mangled editing of Trump’s Jan. 6 speech in a 2024 documentary prompted him to threaten a lawsuit for somewhere between “$1 billion to $5 billion.” The Times of London, meanwhile, was embarrassed last month after claiming to quote former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio railing against mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — only to apologize for mistakenly quoting a different man with the same name. De Blasio later questioned whether the Rupert Murdoch-owned U.K. outlet had “abandoned meaningful journalistic standards and ethics.”
All news organizations have protocols for assessing the veracity of what they publish, though the administration of standards can range from handling grammatical and style matters to CNN’s “triad” approach, which includes a trio of newsroom editors, lawyers and standard-specific editors who drill into a story before it runs. Though integral to newsrooms, standards can be part of the business, with outlets having different practices and processes, and several declined to discuss their specific approaches.
But today’s perilous legal environment has forced news organizations to be extra-cautious in buttoning up copy and upholding already high standards, while also being willing to defend their journalism in new ways. Several outlets, including the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian U.S., opened up with TheWrap about operating in a second Trump era and in an era of declining trust in the mainstream media.
And while accuracy is important, Healy said, it’s also about “making really public statements, comments on social media and elsewhere, defending our journalism, explaining our journalism, standing up for our reporters and other journalists when they come under attack.”
The new battleground
In September, Trump sued the Times and three of its reporters for $15 billion for libel over a series of stories the paper published about the president, his family and his businesses, mostly in the years before his second term.
Healy reiterated the Times’ position that Trump’s lawsuit against the paper has “no merit,” characterizing it as “an attempt to stifle independent reporting and generate PR attention.” But he said such tactics informed the Times’ public approach to handling attacks on its journalism, recognizing that news organizations are facing greater scrutiny from a public inherently distrustful of the outlets that produce the news.
“We’re just very aware of the pressure campaigns and activists from all sides who want the news media to referee and the Times to bend our standards and change our language in their favor, and President Trump and his administration are a big part of that,” Healy said.
Trump’s camp, however, remains consistent in its attack on media.
“President Trump is committed to continue holding those who traffic in lies, deception and fake news accountable for their reckless and politically motivated efforts to defame him and the MAGA movement,” a spokesperson for the president’s outside legal team told TheWrap.
In this litigious climate, how a news organization commits to its standards department is of new relevance. After a year of legal turmoil over its editorial policies, CBS News lost its head of standards, Claudia Milne, in October in the wake of Bari Weiss’ appointment as its editor-in-chief.
Weiss has since considered dismantling the network’s standards department for “holding too much power,” according to the Independent, after CBS News axed its race and culture unit during layoffs last month. Both departments questioned CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s handling of an interview with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates over the Israel-Gaza conflict, prompting Weiss to defend him in a Free Press editorial last year.
“She also asked openly, ‘What’s the point of standards?’” a CBS News source told the Independent. (CBS News did not respond to a request for comment on its plans for its standards department.)
Healy wouldn’t discuss Weiss’ management of CBS News’ standards department. But he said the Times has increased its standards desk by roughly 10 editors over the last several years. “The standards desk has grown just as the work has grown commensurate with the newsroom expanding,” Healy said.
“Other news organizations are going to make their choices,” Healy added. “I really can’t pass judgment there, but I know for us, standards are core to what the Times does, and having an organized and robust standards desk of really excellent editors is essential to our journalism.”
The Guardian U.S. has also been “doubling down” on its commitment to its newsroom standards, deputy editor for news Paul Harris told TheWrap. Harris said the U.K.-based paper’s U.S. edition had already maintained a high bar for accuracy — ”We’re not a casual news organization at the best of times, and we’re super not a casual news organization now” — but the president’s hostility toward the press forces the Guardian to work to prevent those who see it as a “political enemy” from latching onto mistakes.
“There’s obviously no doubt that Trump does see the press as the enemy of the people, and the Guardian, as a proudly progressive news organization, is probably not his favorite,” Harris said. “So we would have high newsroom standards anyway, for ethical reasons, but there is now a very solid, obviously practical reason to have them as well.”
Harris said the paper has “definitely” been conducting more legal reviews of its stories than it did in the past, ensuring it was “more careful” in making sure its work stood up to scrutiny. It is also one of the few outlets that continues to employ a public editor, which it calls its “readers’ editor,” to serve as its internal conduit for its audience to scrutinize the newsroom’s reporting and hold it accountable for mistakes.
“We deal with them all the time,” he said. “Sometimes in ways that, as a head editor, you’re on the wrong end of, but that’s just the way it is and it’s also the way it should be.”
The Journal’s stories aren’t generally receiving additional legal scrutiny, said Elena Cherney, the paper’s head of standards and ethics, but reporters continue to have access to legal advice in the course of their reporting. She said the paper’s ethos of reporting all sides of a story and getting as much information on the record was its north star, one that dated back to when she first started at the Journal in 2000.
“Even then, many other news organizations didn’t expect the same level of reporting rigor from reporters as the Journal did and still does,” she wrote in an email. “Our standards put a big onus on our journalists to go the extra mile.”
Trump continues to issue threats, suggesting in September that he might sue ABC for airing late night host Jimmy Kimmel, and last week called for the host to be fired. He has yet to file a lawsuit against the BBC, though he signaled it would be soon; a spokesperson for the legal team did not answer questions on the lawsuit’s timing. In its apology to Trump last week over the documentary’s editing, the BBC said it believed there was no basis for a defamation claim.
Harris said his paper would remain undeterred in covering the Trump administration, though he noted that even if news organizations report accurately, they could still face legal action. “If the White House wants to come for you, it will anyway,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily need you to have got your facts wrong to launch a multibillion-dollar lawsuit.”
“The ultimate goal is to kill reporting”
There’s a reason Trump isn’t hesitating to file one lawsuit after another: He’s been successful at putting various media outlets on their heels.
The president in December extracted a $16 million settlement from Disney from his defamation suit last year against ABC and George Stephanopoulos, in which the president took issue with Stephanopoulos’ on-air claim that a jury found Trump liable for “rape” instead of its actual finding of “sexual abuse,” a legal distinction in New York.
Trump likewise got a $16 million settlement in July from CBS-parent Paramount over a lawsuit related to how “60 Minutes” edited a Kamala Harris interview, a move critics saw as the company paving the way for regulatory approval of its merger with Skydance.
The two settlements, paid toward his impending presidential library, appear to have emboldened Trump in his quest to fight news organizations over unflattering stories, forcing companies to shell out millions and alarming media law experts in the process.
The ultimate goal is to kill reporting and to kill journalism that is less favorable to him.” – Katie Townsend, former Reporters Committee for Free of the Press deputy executive director
“You’re inflicting pain by engaging in the lawfare, whether or not the outcome is ultimately in your favor,” said Katie Townsend, a Gibson Dunn partner and the former deputy executive director and legal director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Donald Trump is very smart about that. He realizes it would ensure pressure, it’s a way to inflict pain, and the ultimate goal is to kill reporting and to kill journalism that is less favorable to him, that’s more critical to him and his administration and his administration’s policies, and that’s the end game.”
As The Wall Street Journal in July prepared to publish details of an alleged letter Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein within a sketch of a woman’s nude body for the financier’s 50th birthday, Trump reportedly told the paper he would sue them “just like I sued everyone else.” A day after the story broke, Trump sued the paper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, for $10 billion for defamation. (The House Oversight Committee in September released the letter allegedly penned by Trump.)
While the Journal wouldn’t comment on the president’s lawsuit, Cherney said it remained undeterred in its coverage of the second Trump era, which has produced a string of scoops. (A Dow Jones spokesperson has previously said the paper has “full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”)
“It’s less about having rigid standards and more about upholding our existing high standards, which have always been about maintaining reader trust in the fairness and accuracy of our newsgathering,” Cherney wrote in an email.
“Practices like our commitment to ‘no surprises’ journalism, which means we seek to provide a chance for full and fair comment before we publish a story, stand us in good stead at a moment when journalistic practices are under a microscope.”
