A jury in Florida on Friday ordered CNN to pay $5 million for defaming a private security contractor in a five-minute segment that ran on the network in November 2021.
CNN settled the lawsuit hours later for an undisclosed sum, before the jury had an opportunity to award additional punitive damages in the case. Those damages could have been far higher than the initial figure awarded by the jury.
News organizations are facing an increasingly adverse legal and political environment. There are robust First Amendment protections for journalists, and plaintiffs in defamation cases must prove that a news outlet published false information despite knowing the information was wrong.
But public opinion has turned sharply against news organizations, just as financial constraints on the industry’s business model have made it tougher to fend off suits. ABC News surprised industry observers last month when it agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation claim brought by President-elect Donald J. Trump.
“We remain proud of our journalists and are 100 percent committed to strong, fearless and fair-minded reporting at CNN,” a network spokeswoman said in a statement, “though we will of course take what useful lessons we can from this case.”
The CNN case was concluded after a two-week trial in a Panama City, Fla., courtroom, where lawyers for the contractor, Zachary Young, argued that the network had falsely accused him of illegally participating in a “black market” for exfiltration services in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of American forces.
The segment, narrated by the correspondent Alexander Marquardt, focused on contractors who, the network said, were charging exorbitant fees to evacuate Afghans.
Mr. Young, a Navy veteran, filed his lawsuit in 2022. He was the only contractor featured by name in the segment, which he said ruined his reputation and harmed his business. Mr. Young said that he provided his services to major corporations seeking to aid employees in Afghanistan, and that his prices were fair.
The trial included testimony from Mr. Marquardt, who was confronted with internal CNN communications, revealed as part of the litigation, that showed him deriding Mr. Young to colleagues. At one point, he wrote, “We gonna nail this Zachary Young,” and referred to him with an expletive. Other messages showed some CNN staff members calling the report “flawed.”
“It was not a hit piece, I don’t do hit pieces,” Mr. Marquardt testified. The correspondent said that he followed the facts in his reporting and had learned “unsavory” details about Mr. Young’s business practices.
CNN argued that its report, which aired during an episode of “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” did not assert anything false about Mr. Young. In 2022, the network removed the segment from its website and said it regretted the use of the term “black market,” arguing that the phrase was intended to refer to unregulated activities, not unlawful ones.
Lawyers for the network said that its journalists had taken good-faith efforts to ensure an accurate report, and that they were seeking to bring attention to the plight of Afghans attempting to flee a chaotic and violent situation.
The location of the trial, in a Florida county where Mr. Trump won roughly three-quarters of the vote in 2024, was considered a disadvantage for CNN, whose coverage has been vilified by Mr. Trump and his supporters. Mr. Trump’s lawsuit against ABC, which was ultimately settled, was also filed in Florida.
“Libel law is becoming a more serious concern, including for traditional mainstream media,” said Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who studies First Amendment law. He said that the rise of hyper-politicized news outlets and unchecked social media had influenced public perceptions of the industry.
Among jurors, he added, “I do think there’s a sense that media these days are a lot less careful than they used to be.”
