CNN journalist: Young’s get “your facts right” message a “bullying tactic”

A CNN journalist said she saw it as a “bullying tactic” when Zachary Young messaged her to “have your facts right to avoid libel.”

Katie Bo Lillis, a senior reporter at CNN, discussed messages she exchanged with Young during her testimony in the network’s defamation trial on Wednesday.

Why It Matters

Trust in legacy media organizations has been declining in the United States for years. In April 2023, Fox News settled a lawsuit for $787 million after broadcasting false claims that voting machines were rigged in the 2020 presidential election.

Media organizations are closely monitoring the CNN case to assess the limits of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech protections.

What To Know

Zachary Young, a U.S. Navy veteran, is suing CNN, accusing the network of defamation and libel. He was featured in a segment on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper on November 11, 2021, about the U.S. military‘s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Young operated a business that helped Afghan citizens evacuate during that time.

Lillis and Young exchanged several messages before the segment aired, which were shown in court.

“As you proceed, I would just appreciate if you would take the time to make sure you have your facts right to avoid libel,” Young said in a message to Lillis.

Lillis said she took the message as a “bullying tactic.”

“It’s happened to me a couple of times in my career when I’m talking to somebody, and they, for whatever reason, think that I’m going to wind up writing something that they don’t like,” Lillis said. “And they will sort of preemptively threaten libel to try to scare me into not reporting.”

Lillis also explained a message she sent to CNN chief national security correspondent Alex Marquardt, in which she said Young knows he is doing “something shady.”

“His reticence to talk when so many of these other evacuation operations were so hungry for the press to try to do this was a red flag to me,” Lillis said.

She said other evacuators in Afghanistan wanted to tell their story on CNN to help bring attention to their organization and raise money.

“I couldn’t see a reason why Mr. Young’s approach to these questions was so different from everybody else that I was dealing with in this space,” she said. “And it was notable to me. He was an outlier.”

She said Young’s “threats of defamation and libel” also seemed “defensive and shady” to her.

What People Are Saying

Zachary Young, while testifying about messages to Katie Bo Lillis: “It’s almost like I had a crystal ball, and I hadn’t seen the article or the video yet, but that’s exactly what she was doing.”

What Happens Next

Evidence continues to be presented to the jury as the defamation trial continues. It is expected to last two weeks.

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