On Tuesday, the Bay County, Florida courthouse hosted the first hearing of Zachary Young v Puck News, one of the many defamation cases brought by the Navy veteran in the fallout of his successful defamation trial against CNN. A major motion was on the docket as Judge William Henry had to weigh the evidence in Puck’s motion to dismiss the case, and for the parties to move forward with discovery. And it’s going to be a long 30 days until Judge Henry filed his ruling.
As NewsBusters was first to report about the case, Young accused left-leaning Puck News, via the reporting of “entertainment law expert” Eriq Gardner, of choosing to “repeat and spread the false claims of CNN.” Additionally, Young suggested Puck was trying to dismiss the merits of the case by suggesting he only won because of the venue and the Florida court system.
Being a pivotal motion that would obviously determine the future of the case, and possibly have knock-on effects for Young’s other cases, Judge Henry pressed both parties on the merits of their arguments. Since it was Puck’s motion, they were up first.
HAPPENING NOW: Hearing the defamation case Zachary Young v Puck News. https://t.co/X0JwhPyrBS
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) June 24, 2025
On Puck’s bismerching of the venue, Judge Henry called out Gardner’s framing and read from his article:
What about in the September 1 [article], there's this, the short part dealing with CNN specifically. You got the other – next subheading of ‘another Netflix headache.’ And then the first line of that is, ‘the courtroom drama for CNN is symptomatic of a broader surge of defamation lawsuits and of media companies encountering increased judicial hostility in Republican strongholds’ … and then the concluding two paragraphs, where it talked about, ‘it's possible and that in the home stretch of the presidential election, Trump brings some of his - brings some of this up. When he was president, Trump didn't make many actual changes to libel law, but his attacks on the media changed the atmosphere, maybe influencing judges, especially those here, his allies appointed to be more receptive to libel claims as a result … bigger threat may be what's going on right now in lower courts. The judicial system's new readiness to entertain lengthy and costly defamation suits based on nuanced interpretations of a media outlet's content means it might be time for the industry to come up with a new defensive plan.’
“But when you're putting it in that context where it's sort of a criticism of, I guess, the state of the law of - that people are able to bring claims, have claims survive that otherwise didn't used to survive in the context of defamation law. Is that painting a different narrative when you - yes, you can report certain of the facts, but you can have an implication by having arguably true facts, but putting them in a bad light?” Judge Henry questioned Puck’s lawyer, Nathan Seigel.
Seigel responded by arguing Gardner was only commenting on the state of the law in America for media outlets, and “that actually reinforces what we're saying” in that “the laws advanced to a point where it may be dangerous to make implications that go beyond any underlying facts.”
To defend their objection to the motion to dismiss, Young’s counsel Jason Grieves pointed out that Puck’s reporting claimed “CNN's real problem was geographical. The trial was set in Panama City, one of Florida's deepest red outposts.”
Judge Henry pointed out that Bay County was a deep red and that it could have played into a decision to have the CNN case tried there. But he did go on to defend the trial by pointing out the great extents he went through to ensure an unbiased jury that could render a just verdict:
Probably because it's a deep red outpost and didn't think there'd be too many people that were favorable for CNN. Why did I summon 150 or 200 people for jury duty? Cause I was concerned about getting a fair jury that didn't have strong opinions about CNN. Why did I excuse a handful of people off that jury because they expressed a strong opinion about CNN. I mean, aren't these all factual things? I mean, as a lawyer, these are strategy things.
This especially upended Gardner’s assertions about why CNN lost the trial.
Further, Grieves argued that Puck’s reporting needed to be looked at in its totally to see the allegedly defamatory nature:
Some of these things taken in isolation, you know, maybe aren't as problematic, but when you put them all together under the headline of, you know, he's just a sensitive man, when, again, the record at this point is so overwhelming, that he was not a sensitive man. He was a man whose business was destroyed by a gratuitous smear. The suggestion of the gist of this article as a whole is that he had no real reason to sue.
Part of Young’s argument was that Puck had cherry picked facts from Judge Henry’s summary judgement order and omitted the fact the court had found that Young had done nothing illegal while getting people out of Afghanistan.
During Puck’s rebuttal, Judge Henry pressed the outlet by recalling a conversation he had with one of CNN’s attorneys Charles Tobin (who was also representing the Associated Press in the defamation case Young brought against them) about “half-assed” reporting, which NewsBusters reported on:
Obviously, we've got a big record of what was filed in the CNN case. Mr. Gardner is pulling parts of it out to throw in there. Mr. Tobin and I got into a whole conversation during one of our hearings at one point in time about what I called half-ass reporting. And he was, I said, so what you're arguing is that CNN can do half-ass reporting and only include half of it. And he said yes, except for the circumstance where the information was sitting on your desk, you know, and you just chose to ignore it, which I think is somewhat of the argument they're making is the information was in the court file of Mr. Gardner cherry picked some of the information to put into these pieces.
“I mean, the fact that he's got the court file that he can sift through and he leaves parts of it out or he just cherry picks and puts certain facts, and that's what they're saying supports their punitive damages. Is that some evidence of his intent?” Judge Henry asked Seigel.
“No, because, I mean, look at what the, look at what the gist of what he reported is. I mean, this is kind of circling back, right?” Seigel said. “I'm sure if you asked Mr. Tobin, now, you know, do you think Puck could have done a better job of reporting things in the court file at that point that were more favorable to you? He would have said yes too.”
Recalling more from the CNN case, Judge Henry seemed to draw comparisons between Puck’s cherry picking of the case filings and CNN’s Alex Marquardt (who was recently fired for his reporting leading to the case) and Katie Bo Lillis; noting how they only really listened to the people who smeared Young and didn’t really try to check out his side of the story:
HENRY: But my point here is, we've got a little bit different situation where if Mr. Gardner is just looking at what's in the court file. He's putting that blinders on, but the stuff is sitting on his desk or on his computer or he has access to it to focus on things.That's the argument Mr. Grieves is essentially you're making, right, to some extent?
GRIEVES: I think that’s fair.
“I just don't see anything there that says he published something knowingly false,” Siegel proclaimed.
Again, Judge Henry was tough on both parties; likely because of the gravity of the motion and both sides needed to bring their A game. He also didn’t appear to tip his hand on which way he was leaning. Partially because of a busy court schedule, he would not be ready to issue a ruling for 30 days. But he did want both parties to prepare for discovery in the event he decided the case could proceed.
