Watchdog Appeals After Court Grants X Access To Donor Lists

By Spencer Brewer ·  Listen to article

Law360 (October 2, 2024, 10:25 PM EDT) — The nonprofit group Media Matters for America appealed to the Fifth Circuit on Tuesday after a Texas federal judge ordered it to turn over its donor lists to social media platform X Corp., saying that it still had a First Amendment privilege to keep the names of its donors private.

In a Tuesday motion to stay, the left-leaning media watchdog asked U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor to stay the case until the Fifth Circuit could weigh in on whether Media Matters waived its First Amendment privilege against compelled disclosure of donor-related documents. Judge O’Connor previously ruled that the watchdog had waived its privilege, ordering the nonprofit to hand over the documents to X.

“No court in the United States has ever compelled a media organization to turn over — without even the prospect of redaction — every ‘donor and financial document’ in its possession,” Media Matters said in the Tuesday motion to stay.

X, formerly known as Twitterlaunched the suit after a reporter at Media Matters penned an article titled “X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content,” claiming the platform was responsible for neo-Nazi and antisemitic content being placed next to advertisers’ paid posts. The social media company said several advertisers fled the site because of alleged lies in the article.

In Media Matters’ telling, the court granted the requests based on conjecture that some of the documents in question could have bearing on jurisdiction or malice, despite first agreeing that turning over donor lists would likely go beyond the nonprofit’s First Amendment rights. The court skated past the “granularity” that the First Amendment demands, the nonprofit said.

The court’s conclusion that the watchdog’s First Amendment rights somehow don’t apply to their donors runs counter to the record of the case, the group said. Media Matters is in an “existential struggle” to sustain its journalism against a foe that seeks to silence its critics, it said in its brief.

The media watchdog also claims to have complied with previous court orders. A stay in the case would serve the public interest and prevent serious harm, it said.

“Should this Court’s order compelling disclosure of donors’ information remain in place, the harm will be immediate and irreparable,” Media Matters said. “Existing donors will face a substantially increased risk of threats, harassment, and reprisals, as Media Matters’s own employees have already experienced.”

In the wake of the suit, it said one harasser sent an image of a noose to Eric Hananoki, the reporter who wrote the article. Media Matters said a voicemail message threatened violence if the watchdog kept “pushing things,” and another harasser emailed a Media Matters reporter a photograph of him and his wife and wrote: “We know where you live. Expect a visit.”

To subject the watchdog’s donors to these kinds of threats would breach their right to associate privately, Media Matters said in an earlier filing. The threats against Media Matters’ staff have “exploded in both number and intensity” since X launched its lawsuit.

X is represented by Judd E. Stone II, Christopher D. Hilton, Ari Cuenin, Alexander M. Dvorscak and Michael R. Abrams of Stone Hilton PLLC and John C. Sullivan of SL Law PLLC.

Media Matters is represented by Andrew LeGrand, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. and Amer S. Ahmed of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Abha Khanna, Aria C. Branch, Christopher D. Dodge and Jacob D. Shelly of Elias Law Group LLP.

The case is X Corp. v. Media Matters for America et al., case number 4:23-cv-01175, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

–Editing by Andrew Cohen.