United States President Donald Trump’s early legal wins against broadcasters ABC and CBS have given way to defeats and retreats as courts and newsrooms act to protect press freedom.

“News organisations recognise that the only positive outcome to this is prevailing against the president and standing up for the reporters and their newsrooms,” said Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Centre at Middle Tennessee State University.

At the end of July, the Justice Department withdrew subpoenas issued to New York Times (NYT) journalists who had written articles about the security of Trump’s presidential aircraft.

It was forced to act after a federal judge slammed the administration’s sloppy legal work and found it violated protections granted to journalists and their sources.

The president has also filed defamation suits targeting The New York Times over articles and a book about the origins of his fortune, and the Wall Street Journal over an article about a salacious letter he sent to Jeffrey Epstein.

Both are floundering.

“If you’re willing to stand up to Trump, you’re going to do fairly well in court, given the lack of merit behind the cases that he has filed,” observes Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.

The cases involving ABC and CBS ended in December 2024 and July 2025 with the broadcasters promising to pay $15 million and $16 million, respectively.

Trump sued ABC for defamation over statements about a civil judgment against Trump in a sexual assault case.

He took CBS to court for allegedly misleading viewers by airing different clips of the same answer from an interview with 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

But most legal experts agree that the courts could have thrown out Trump’s claims.

Both reached the settlements “for business reasons”, said Kennedy.

CBS’s parent company Paramount Global, for instance, was seeking regulatory approval for its merger with Skydance.

Media strategy

After ABC kept talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, a nightly critic of Trump, on the air, and elected not to air a live Trump speech about supposed electoral fraud, the network now faces threats to some of its local station licenses from federal authorities.

In another case, the BBC, which the US president is suing for $10 billion over an allegedly misleading edit of one of his speeches, has adopted a strategy that experts expect to become more widespread.

The British broadcaster is demanding that Trump’s legal team produce financial documents in order to quantify the damages suffered.

“That is the biggest deterrent of all for a man who has constantly resisted efforts to look inside his empire and financial circumstances,” said Paulson.

Trump’s real objective, however, is not to win the lawsuits, experts say.

“You go right back to the beginning of his political career, 11-12 years ago, and it’s been a central part of his strategy to discredit the news media,” said Kennedy.

“He does that by insulting them, calling them fake news, calling them enemies of the people, and he does it by filing lawsuits.”

Paulson said that “Trump and his lawyers have no realistic expectation that they will prevail in a court of law somewhere down the road”.

“But that can take years and millions of dollars, and Trump knows from his business experience that if he can apply enough pressure, someone will cough up a check.”