Not long ago, former Fox News investigative reporter Catherine Herridge began a painful daily ritual. With her oldest son for support, she walked to the mailbox at the end of her street and dropped an envelope into the mail. It contained a check for a daily fine of $800 that she was ordered to pay to coerce her into revealing her confidential sources in a national security story that aired on Fox News in 2017. The money came from the college funds of her two children.
As Herridge drained the savings of her military family, an alleged former colonel in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was demanding that a court increase the daily fine to $5,000. A court later rescinded the fines, but they will be reimposed unless the Supreme Court takes Herridge’s case and reverses the lower courts.
Yanping Chen led a school called the University of Management and Technology (UMT) in Northern Virginia, which catered to U.S. service members. According to investigators and experts, Chen’s past in the Chinese military suggested that UMT posed a national security danger, including by potentially gathering information on military personnel participating in its programs. The Department of Justice declined to prosecute Chen. Nevertheless, after Herridge’s investigative report, the government terminated its contracts with UMT because it considered the school a national security risk.
All of that would seem to be the makings of a Pulitzer, not a court sanction. It is not uncommon for journalists to be sued by aggrieved subjects of their stories for defamation or other civil claims. Those cases are routinely rejected given the protections for the press under First Amendment cases like New York Times v. Sullivan, requiring a higher burden of proof from public figures suing the media.
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