Veteran Suing CNN for Defamation Says Reporter Ignored the Facts, Would Not Listen When He Said He Never Charged Afghans for Evacuation

CNN appeared to suffer a blow on Wednesday as a lawyer for Navy veteran Zachary Young, who is suing the news broadcaster for defamation, highlighted exchanges that showed reporters giving Mr. Young very little time to respond to a negative story before it was broadcast and ignoring key information that debunked their allegation he was “preying” on desperate Afghans trying to flee their country.At the heart of the defamation trial is a news segment that aired on CNN’s “The Lead With Jake Tapper” in 2021 that focused on efforts by contractors to help people evacuate from Afghanistan during the Americans’ hasty withdrawal and the return of the Taliban. The segment mentioned Mr. Young, who claims the network defamed him by accusing him of “preying” on Afghans and charging “exorbitant fees” to evacuate them from the country. Mr. Young says he never charged Afghans to evacuate and instead charged major corporations who wanted Afghans and other personnel extracted from the country. His testimony stretched into a second day on Wednesday. He accused CNN “senior reporter” Katie Bo Lillis of reaching out to him under misleading pretenses, saying she wanted to speak to him as part of CNN’s reporting on “ongoing efforts to help get at-risk Afghans out of the country” and the “various different models folks are following to get people out.” She did not initially tell him she was preparing a negative report specifically about him.Additionally, one of his lawyers, Vel Freedman, highlighted an exchange on the encrypted messaging app Signal where Ms. Lillis said the fees he charged to help evacuate people from Afghanistan seemed to be “exorbitant” for the average person. Mr. Young responded, “Pricing always depends on local resource availability at any given time in a highly unstable environment.”Zachary Young says CNN defamed him with this report alleging he was operating a black market charging desperate Afghans huge prices to evacuate their country. CNN“No Afghan is expected to pay for evac costs, none would ever be able,” Mr. Young told Ms. Lillis. “Rather, we’ve focused on aligning corporate sponsors who have the resources to support those Afghans most in need, the ‘kill list’ variety.”Mr. Freedman asked, “Could you have been clearer to CNN about who you expected to pay [the evacuation fees]?”“No,” Mr. Young responded.Mr. Freeman asked, “Did she listen?”“No,” Mr. Young said. In another message, Mr. Young re-emphasized that he partners with corporations who pay his evacuation fees and did not expect Afghans to pay them. He added, “As you proceed, I would just appreciate it if you would take the time to make sure you have your facts right to avoid libel.”Another exhibit shown by the plaintiffs was an exchange on Signal between Mr. Young and Alex Marquardt, CNN’s “chief national security correspondent,” who was calling one day before the piece would air and wanted him to comment on allegations he was price gouging desperate Afghans. During the Signal exchange, Mr. Marquardt claimed he’d reached out to Mr. Young a week earlier for comment and received no response. Mr. Young insists that Mr. Marquardt never called him until just before the broadcast. Mr. Young’s phone records do not show a call from Mr. Marquardt. Mr. Young was at Vienna at the time Mr. Marquardt reached out to him, and he received the message at 8:42 p.m. local time. The CNN reporter asked Mr. Young for comment but did not indicate that their story would be running the very next day. Mr. Young said he did not respond until roughly 21 hours after the initial message was received, thinking he had more time before it was set to air.CNN has been dealt a number of setbacks by the judge. Law and CrimeUpon being told that the segment was set to run in a few hours, Mr. Young quickly responded that that deadline was “not realistic” and asked for a “few days” to prepare his responses to Mr. Marquardt’s questions. Mr. Young said he warned Mr. Marquardt that “some of your facts/assertions” were not accurate and that he would “seek legal damages” if the story was published. The opening arguments in the rare defamation trial against a media company kicked off Tuesday morning. An attorney for Mr. Young, Kyle Roche, said the segment made his client into an “international pariah” and destroyed his business by implying he operated illegally on the “black market.” He also said CNN accused his client of “illegally preying on desperate Afghans in a black market operation.”“The facts didn’t matter. CNN felt that they had a sensational story that would drive ratings, and they didn’t care about the truth,” Mr. Roche told jurors. “How do we know that? Because the emails and behind the scenes video footage show that CNN took pleasure in casting Zach as the villain for their hit piece.”His comment appeared to refer to internal communications from CNN staffers, disclosed as part of the lawsuit’s discovery process, that showed CNN staff, including Mr. Marquardt, making disparaging remarks about Mr. Young and reveling in the prospect of bringing him down. The internal communications also showed multiple CNN editorial managers raised doubts about the story. The messages that were disclosed showed staffers calling the story “flawed,” filled with “more holes than Swiss cheese,” and “incomplete.” At one point, an editor for CNN.com said the piece was not solid enough to be published online, suggesting that there was a lower standard for what was broadcast on linear television. Nevertheless, after the video piece was broadcast on Jake Tapper’s CNN show, a written version then appeared on CNN.com. CNN anchor Jake Tapper, left, refused to divulge his salary during the discovery process. AP/Andrew HarnikIn opening arguments for the defense, an attorney for CNN, David Axelrod, maintained that the network’s reporting was tough but fair. He played the segment at the heart of the trial and noted that for roughly three minutes of the clip, Mr. Young was not mentioned as he tried to dispute the notion CNN targeted him or that he was the focus of the segment.However, Mr. Freedman criticized the defense team for not disclosing other transcripts from clips teasing the segment in which Mr. Tapper accused Mr. Young of “preying” on people trying to get out of Afghanistan. Mr. Young noted during his testimony he worked with corporations such as Amazon’s Audible that would sponsor evacuations from Afghanistan and pay for specific people trying to get out of the country.Mr. Freedman also showed messages sent to Mr. Young from someone in Afghanistan seeking evacuation services. In the exhibit, Mr. Young highlighted the cost of the services. He told Mr. Freedman he blocked the individual because he did not have a corporate sponsor who could pay the fee, and he did not want the individual to try to negotiate with him instead of looking for other routes out of the country. CNN’s chief national security correspondent, Alexander Marquardt, did not give Zachary Young sufficient time to respond to CNN’s allegations, Mr. Young claims. CNNIn November 2021, Mr. Tapper introduced the controversial segment as he told viewers, “CNN’s Alexander Marquardt has discovered Afghans trying to get out of the country face a black market full of promises, demands of exorbitant fees, and no guarantee of safety or success.”The report only mentioned one contractor — Mr. Young. During the segment, the Navy veteran’s face was shown on a graphic referencing “black markets” and “exorbitant fees.” The graphic also noted his company was asking for $75,000 to transport passengers to Pakistan or $14,500 to transport them to the United Arab Emirates.In the clip, the CNN reporter said those fees are “well beyond the reach of most Afghans.” Mr. Young told Mr. Marquardt in a text message that “Afghans trying to leave are expected to have a sponsor pay for them,” and evacuation costs are “highly volatile and based on environmental realities.” At the time, some American corporations with employees in Afghanistan were seeking to relocate them before the Taliban returned to power and punished them for collaboration with the occupation.In March 2022, the CNN news personality Pamela Brown, who was substituting for Mr. Tapper on his show, issued an on-air correction and apology for the segment.Taliban special forces fighters arrive inside the Hamid Karzai International Airport after the U.S. military’s withdrawal at Kabul, Afghanistan, August 31, 2021. AP/Khwaja Tawfiq Sediqi“In November, we ran a story about Afghans desperate to flee the country who faced paying high sums beyond the reach of average Afghans. The story included a lead-in and banner throughout the story that referenced a ‘black market.’ The use of the term ‘black market’ in the story was an error. The story included reporting on Zachary Young,” Ms. Brown said. “We did not intend to suggest that Mr. Young participated in the black market. We regret the error, and to Mr. Young, we apologize.” Mr. Tapper, on whose eponymous show the segment aired, never apologized on camera.In June 2022, Mr. Young filed the $1 billion lawsuit as he said the original segment, which was re-aired three times and posted on the network’s website, “destroyed his reputation and business” by labeling him an “illegal profiteer” who preyed upon “desperate Afghans.”Defamation can be difficult to prove in America, where there are extensive protections for journalists. But ahead of the trial in the 14th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida, on Florida’s conservative panhandle, the judge overseeing the case, William Henry, granted Mr. Young a series of wins. He ruled that Mr. Young “did not act illegally or criminally.” He also said that the on-air apology from CNN was not sufficient under Florida law, pointing out that the “correction was not made during the other television shows in which the segment aired… no retraction, correction or any apology was posted on any online article or with any social media posting.”Also, notably, Judge Henry told CNN to comply with the plaintiff’s request for extensive, confidential financial information from CNN. The plaintiffs needed the information, they said, so as to determine what size of judgment CNN would need to be assessed to deter the network from engaging in future defamatory actions in its reporting. CNN typically makes about $1 billion in profits a year, though that number has recently dropped due to poor ratings and the secular decline of the cable business. CNN is also a subdivision of the Warner Brothers Discovery media conglomerate, a giant business that owns a major movie studio and HBO, among other properties. A judgement big enough to sting would probably be $1 billion or more.Zachary Young says the CNN report destroyed his business. CNNIt is not common for defamation lawsuits against media companies to actually make it to trial. Such cases are often settled or dismissed before they get to the trial phase or dismissed by judges via summary judgment. In December, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle President-elect Trump’s defamation lawsuit against it. Meanwhile, Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News also agreed to settle defamation cases in recent years involving incorrect reporting about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Fox paid the Dominion voting machine company $780 million, a record.During the discovery process, in addition to seeking CNN’s private financials, Mr. Young’s attorneys also asked Mr. Tapper, during a deposition, to reveal his salary. Mr. Tapper, who’s believed to make between $7 million and $12 million a year, refused, and CNN’s lawyers called the deposition “a freak show.” It’s not clear if CNN will be forced to divulge Mr. Tapper’s actual salary; doing so could be disruptive within CN, which, like many television news operations, has vast disparities in pay among its on-camera personalities. During a deposition in November, Mr. Tapper said he had “no knowledge about CNN’s net worth” or “any knowledge regarding what the Tapper show may or may not generate that may go toward CNN’s net worth.”The trial is taking place in the deeply conservative Florida panhandle which could put CNN at a disadvantage. CNNHowever, Judge Henry said he had a “hard time believing” the star anchor. He explained, “I have a feeling that is the basis of what time slot he gets and how much his contract is and everything else with CNN.”A loss for CNN would only add to the network’s financial woes as it suffered a roughly 45 percent drop in its primetime viewership, dropping to 405,000 viewers, after the 2024 election. In the coveted 25-to-54-year demo, the network drew in an average of 77,000 primetime views, Nielsen data shows. And for the total day viewers in that demo, the network averaged 94,000 for the year. The network is expected to make sharp budget cuts and implement layoffs amid the ratings plunge and as it attempts a restructuring to focus more on digital news publishing, which is far less lucrative than the declining cable TV business.For Mr. Young’s attorneys to win the case, they will have to convince jurors that the network wanted to harm their client and that its employees knew the information in the segment was false. A former global media counsel for Bloomberg News, Charles Glasser, pointed to internal communications from CNN about the story and told NPR, “My advice to CNN would be to cough it up. Settle. Admit you’re wrong. Admit your hyperbole was out of line, and move on.”Mr. Young has said he will not settle, though it’s not clear if that is a negotiating tactic.Afghanis trying reach the safety of Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 25, 2021 at Kabul. New Zealand Defence Force via Getty ImagesIt’s unclear if Mr. Tapper, Mr. Marquardt, or any other CNN personnel will face consequences over the corrected piece. In 2017, three off-camera CNN journalists were forced to resign after a flawed report about connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. After a disastrous 1998 broadcast about “Operation Tailwind” that alleged U.S. forces in Vietnam used chemical weapons against opponents, CNN retracted the story and fired multiple off-camera journalists. CNN says it is confident it can win the trial. In a statement to The New York Sun, a network spokesman said, “When all the facts come to light, we are confident we will have a verdict in our favor.”

Veteran Suing CNN for Defamation Says Reporter Ignored the Facts, Would Not Listen When He Said He Never Charged Afghans for Evacuation

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