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President Donald Trump’s $10 billion libel suit against Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, and its owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is a litmus test for freedom of the press. 

So far, Dow Jones appears determined to hold to its principles and stand by its reporters. 

“We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit,” Dow Jones said in its initial response to Trump’s lawsuit.

Others have preferred to placate Trump. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and ABC News spent millions in settlement costs to keep Trump from interfering with their larger financial interests. Their surrender to White House shakedowns only magnifies the importance of Dow Jones’s defiance.

Court decisions rejecting Trump’s legal actions against the Des Moines Register, CNN, and Simon & Schuster, all of which the president has appealed, are equally important. 

In The Wall Street Journal’s case, Trump objects to an article alleging that a birthday greeting bearing Trump’s name and a silhouette of a naked woman was sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, before the late financier was charged with sex crimes. Trump described the greeting as “fake,” and claimed that even mentioning that the birthday card exists constituted libel. 

The Journal article, in fact, reported that Trump denied sending the card. Trump claimed that he has never liked to draw and that the card, which was signed with a signature identical to his, was simply not his “language.” Almost immediately after Trump made that claim, similar drawings indisputably by Trump appeared in the press. 

Dow Jones has a stellar record of standing by its reporting. As a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, I know that firsthand.

The Story of My Story

In February 2002, I published in the Journal a front-page story on international efforts, post-9/11, to crack down on the financing of terrorist violence. Lawyers for a Saudi businessman named in the story swiftly sought a correction. At the time, the demand seemed like a storm in a teacup.

I had reported that Saudi authorities were monitoring, at the request of the United States, 150 accounts belonging to the businessman and other prominent Saudis.

The story did not claim that these Saudis had broken any laws, only that authorities were watching their finances. The Journal assumed that the businessman would settle for the paper’s publishing of a letter from him stating that he had done nothing wrong.

What ensued was a four-and-a-half-year multimillion-dollar legal battle that had repercussions far beyond my article. 

The fight ended with a landmark judgment in Britain’s House of Lords that praised the reporting and editing of the story as a model of “responsible journalism” in the public interest.

While deep-pocketed defendants claiming they were libeled can still tie up the courts in extended litigation, the Journal victory boosted investigative journalism in Britain by offering it a long-sought protective shield.

Multiple Solid Sources

My involvement with this hot-button issue actually began with the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, primarily perpetrated by Saudi nationals.

At the time, the Journal sent me to Saudi Arabia to help determine whether the Saudis had unwittingly played a role in the funding of political violence, and to independently establish whether Saudi Arabia was cooperating with US authorities in investigations of the attacks and in broader efforts to counter the militant groups.

From the first, my reportorial efforts were impeded by threatening phone calls from the Saudi security services. The kingdom’s police and intelligence services monitored my phone calls, intimidated sources, interrogated me, and arrested participants in a dinner held for me. A Saudi court sentenced two “participants” to prison terms and flogging.

To determine whether the Saudi government was in fact cooperating with the post-September 11 probes, I needed to ascertain the identities of those being investigated for possible financial ties to the 9/11 bombers. In social settings, I had heard the names of prominent businessmen supposedly under scrutiny, but as long as this information remained uncorroborated, it was insufficient to justify a story. 

By the time I published my article, on February 6, 2002, I had obtained solid confirmation from two other Saudi businessmen, two US diplomats, and a senior Saudi official.

An Angry Suit and a Principled Defense

Within days of publication, the businessman’s lawyers demanded a “correction” and payment of damages and costs. The Journal rejected the businessman’s demands but offered him an opportunity to reply in a letter to the editor.

The businessman refused and instead sued the Journal in London. The newspaper decided to embark on a defense of journalistic principle, and so the Journal and the businessman went to court.

The businessman hoped for a decision condemning the paper for what he deemed an inaccurate story. 

Initially, he got what he wanted: We lost in a lower court and then again in the court of appeal, which passed what it seemingly viewed as a hot potato to the House of Lords, the upper house of the British parliament, members of which sat as the highest court of the land prior to the creation of a Supreme Court in 2009.

The Lords overturned the lower courts’ rulings. 

As a result, the businessman ended up with a verdict he had never bargained for, while the Journal got what it wanted: new protections for the British press to publish stories that are in the public interest and responsibly reported, even if they have the potential to tarnish an individual’s reputation. The stakes in Trump’s Epstein case against Dow Jones are as high as those adjudicated in the British courts, which ultimately confirmed the right of responsible journalists to seek and publish the truth in cases involving the public interest. 

The Bancroft family owned Dow Jones at the time of the British case. Murdoch, the international media mogul, has since acquired Dow Jones. The hope is that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal will be as principled and determined as it was under the Bancrofts’ leadership, and will not, like CBS and ABC, submissively fold in the face of government pressure.

James M. Dorsey is an adjunct senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s Rajaratnam School of International Studies, the author of the syndicated column and podcast The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey, and a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent.