As former President Donald Trump prepares to sue CNN for defamation — as civil liberties legal expert Alan Dershowitz has — Dershowitz told Newsmax that libel cases come down to proving "malice" amid a "reckless disregard for the truth."
"It's very fact-specific," Dershowitz told Saturday's "America Right Now."
"Everybody has to look at the specifics," he added to host Tom Basile. "Now, if you're the former president, or if you're me, you have to show malice. Malice just means reckless disregard for the truth."
CNN clearly has political bias, and it is clearly opposed to Trump, Dershowitz said.
"We know that CNN is extraordinarily biased — extraordinarily biased that you don't get the news from them; you get a one-sided analysis from them, as sometimes you get on the other side from other networks," Dershowitz continued to Basile.
"One reason I love to be on Newsmax is they present all sides of issues. They present me, even though so they know I'm a liberal Democrat who voted against Trump and will continue to vote for liberal Democrats, but the viewers hear all sides.
"Not on CNN. On CNN, you're fired if you try to present a nuanced point of view. I know that because it's happened."
Dershowitz is suing CNN for his Senate impeachment trial defense — the first one — of then-President Trump.
"I've sued CNN for a lot of money because they edited the tape," Dershowitz said. "They took the words 'unlawful, illegal and corrupt,' and then had their flacks on television say, 'Dershowitz says a president can be impeached' — even if he does something that's unlawful, illegal and corrupt, having taken those words out.
"So my case is very, very strong."
CNN's conspicuous bias is "relevant" to defamation lawsuits, Dershowitz noted.
"Well, malice means, in a specific case, the defamatory material either is false, knowingly — or the people who asserted it recklessly disregarded the truth," Dershowitz said. "It's relevant that they have a bias — that they're prepared to obsess about an issue.
"In my case, there's evidence, and we're going to present it at the trial, that they deliberately, deliberately, wanted to discredit me because I had done such a good job in defending the president on the floor on the first day.
"Their goal was to discredit me and we're going to be able to prove that at trial."
Dershowitz recently released his 50th book "The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth the Consequences," where he addresses the new-age difficulty of staying true to principles of law in the age of political division, saying Democrats are even out to get him because he is critical of the weaponization of political differences.
About NEWSMAX TV:
NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.