The rich and powerful are now waging war on entire media groups So soon after the Daily Mail celebrated a Brexit vote which seemed to endorse the vehemently Eurosceptic paper’s claims to […]

So soon after the Daily Mail celebrated a Brexit vote which seemed to endorse the vehemently Eurosceptic paper’s claims to represent the rump of British public opinion, it faces storm clouds in America in the form of a lawsuit from the First Lady.

Melania Trump is suing the Mail for $150 million (£120 million) in damages over an article published in August, containing unfounded hearsay that she worked as a high-class escort in the 1990s. The paper has acknowledged that the rumours are without substance and, unusually for the Mail, published a retraction. Mrs Trump is clearly determined and has reiterated her claim since entering the White House.

The Mail’s reputation was further challenged last week by Wikipedia, the San Francisco-based non-profit online encyclopaedia, which has extraordinarily decided to prohibit the British paper as a source, branding it “generally unreliable” and criticising it for “poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication”.

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Mail Online is major force in American media

The Mail Online website has rapidly become a major force in American media, and the publisher claimed a year ago that US advertising revenues are its “standout story in terms of growth”. It is now under pressure.

“There is something very disturbing about Mrs Trump’s lawsuit.”

Yet the Mail’s media rivals should hesitate to see its current predicament as a time for schadenfreude.

Because there is something very disturbing about Mrs Trump’s lawsuit. She claims the paper has undermined her “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as an extremely famous and well-known person” to “launch a broad-based commercial brand in multiple product categories, each of which could have garnered multi-million dollar business relationships”.

The New York Times – ideologically very far from the Mail – published a leader decrying Mrs Trump’s words as “galling”.

The point of the article

The Mail’s defence of its story was that “it stated that there was no support for the allegations”, and that the “point of the article” was that the already circulating rumours “could impact the US presidential election”.

This is a justification remarkably similar to that made by the liberal-minded BuzzFeed News when it last month published claims linking Donald Trump to Russian prostitutes, while admitting that there was “serious reason to doubt the allegations”. BuzzFeed (not, incidentally, prohibited by Wikipedia) also indicated that it was acting in the interests of democracy and transparency.

I would argue that neither Mr Trump nor his wife deserve to have their reputations traduced by the publication of unfounded rumour, even in the lofty positions they occupy. But so far BuzzFeed has avoided being sued by the famously litigious President, although its article has prompted a lawsuit from a Russian tech executive over “libellous, unverified and untrue allegations”.

The Mail might have been encouraged in thinking there would be no repercussions to its Melania piece (based on claims in a book) after it published with great fanfare in 2015 unverified rumours about David Cameron’s behaviour as an Oxford student, included in a critical biography of the former Prime Minister, written by Lord Ashcroft and serialised in the newspaper. Mr Cameron denied the allegation but did not take legal action.

Unsettling lawsuit

What makes Melania Trump’s lawsuit unsettling is the scale of the claim, a reflection not only of her greed but an apparent desire to inflict lasting damage on an entire publishing group in an act of revenge.

“It’s ironic that the Mail should find itself threatened by the First Lady to a President who shares many of its conservative values and whose election victory it reported sympathetically.”

It recalls the action brought by the wrestler Hulk Hogan, who claimed an eye-watering $140m from blog publisher Gawker Media after it published a video featuring him having sex with a friend’s wife. That case was bank-rolled by the billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel as part of a successful campaign to close down the Gawker website. Gawker Media settled with Hulk for $31m late last year.

Mrs Trump’s lawyer in the the Daily Mail action, Charles Harder, also acted against Gawker. Mr Thiel is a prominent supporter of Mr Trump, who is pursuing an unremitting assault on the established news industry, claiming the media employs “among the most dishonest human beings on earth”.

‘Trumpquake’

It’s ironic that the Mail should find itself threatened by the First Lady to a President who shares many of its conservative values and whose election victory it reported sympathetically as “Trumpquake”, an “electrifying human drama”.

But while America remains a growth opportunity for UK-based news companies, it is not simply a land of plenty; it has the most advanced media industry on earth and its own peculiar culture.

The Guardian, another UK media outlet to make great inroads in the US, has found it harder than it expected to see off established competitors and win over American advertisers.

The surprise is that the land pledged to uphold free speech in its constitution could, in places, harbour such a hatred for professional journalism.

Which is why other publishers might have some sympathy with the current position of the Daily Mail.

@iburrell