Afghanistan Peace Campaign“I wasn’t going after him. I never was going after him,” Marquardt testified.
“It was not a hit piece. I don’t do hit pieces,” he said. “Good reporters shouldn’t. I like to think of myself as that, and I didn’t do a hit piece.”
Under intense questioning from Devin “Velvel” Freedman, Young’s lawyer, Marquardt defended his reporting.
“I reported the facts. I reported what I found,” Marquardt said. “Everything in there was factual, accurate and, I believe, fair.”
“You needed a bad guy for your scandal story,” Freedman said later in the morning. “You hated him, did you not?”
“No, that’s not true,” Marquardt replied.
Young’s legal team is attempting to convince a jury that Marquardt was negligent in his reporting out of a desire to harm Young, who told the jury last week that both his business as a security contractor and his personal life was harshly affected by CNN’s segment.
The trial is, in some ways, a referendum on the act of reporting — specifically, television news reporting. Freedman argued that Marquardt was seeking out dirt on Young; the journalist said he was simply pursuing leads on a story of significant public interest.
The jury on Monday watched behind-the-scenes footage of Marquardt calling Young. After his initial call, the cameras recorded Marquardt standing over his phone as if he were making another call; the lawyer referred to it as a “fake phone call,” but the journalist said it was a standard production practice to take additional photos and video.
“I appreciate that you’re trying to paint this as some sort of scandal,” Marquardt told Freedman.
And when the lawyer accused Marquardt of participating in “theater” by referring to Young as a “character” in an internal message, he responded that “this is the lingo that we use in television news — the people who appear in stories are called ‘characters.’ Certainly I was not engaging in ‘theater.’”
At another point in Marquardt’s testimony, Freedman accused him of “profiting on war and refugees [his] entire career” because of his decades of experience reporting on conflicts around the world.
Still, the lawyer presented evidence to the jury that he argued was proof that Marquardt was angling to hurt Young. “We gonna nail this Zachary Young [expletive],” the journalist said in a message to an editor about a week before the segment aired on CNN. “Gonna hold you to that one, cowboy,” the editor responded.
Young’s team has also shown jurors messages in which CNN employees refer to Young as a “s—bag” with a “punchable face.” “It’s your funeral, bucko,” Marquardt said in one message.
“From what I had seen in his communications with a lot of people, I could tell that there were some unsavory traits,” Marquardt said when asked to explain his messages.
The jury is expected to begin deliberations on a verdict as soon as Thursday. If the jury finds CNN guilty of defamation, jurors could also choose to award Young punitive damages, typically a much larger amount.
To meet the standard for punitive damages, Young will have to prove that CNN intended to harm him and knew what it was reporting was false.