Donald Trump’s initial courtroom successes against major broadcasters have turned into a string of legal setbacks as judges and media organisations mount a robust defence of press freedom.

The shift marks a turning point in the president’s long-running campaign against news outlets, with legal experts saying media companies that stand their ground are finding judges unreceptive to Trump’s claims.

“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 Center at Middle Tennessee State University.

Justice Department forced to back down

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

The retreat came after a federal judge criticised the administration’s legal work and found it violated protections granted to journalists and their sources.

Trump 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 letter he sent to Jeffrey Epstein. Both cases are struggling.

“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,” said Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Massachusetts.

Early settlements raise questions

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

Trump sued ABC for defamation over statements about a civil judgment against him 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.

Most legal experts agree the courts could have dismissed Trump’s claims. Both networks reached the settlements “for business reasons,” Kennedy said.

CBS’s parent company Paramount Global was seeking regulatory approval for its merger with Skydance at the time.

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

BBC adopts financial pressure tactic

The BBC, which Trump is suing for $10 billion over an allegedly misleading edit of one of his speeches, has adopted a strategy experts expect to become more widespread.

The British broadcaster is demanding Trump’s legal team produce financial documents 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,” Paulson said.

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Lawsuits part of broader media strategy

Trump’s real objective is not to win the lawsuits, experts say, but to undermine public trust in journalism.

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

“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 Trump and his lawyers have no realistic expectation they will prevail in court.

“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.”