https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-abc-settlement/
Politics
Trump’s Attack on the Free Press Is Just Getting Started
The president-elect’s recent settlement with ABC News is an early volley in an all-out MAGA war against media independence.
Politics
Trump’s Attack on the Free Press Is Just Getting Started
The president-elect’s recent settlement with ABC News is an early volley in an all-out MAGA war against media independence.
by Chris Lehmann
December 17, 2024
The Nation
President Donald Trump talks with ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos before a town hall at National Constitution Center, Tuesday, September 15, 2020, in Philadelphia. (Evan Vucci / AP Photo)
Like all sequels, the incoming Trump administration promises a grislier body count driven by ever more implausible narrative arcs. A prime case in point has been the media’s repellent capitulation to the Trumpian ethos of impunity for the powerful, well in advance of the president-elect’s inauguration next month. MSNBC’s erstwhile resistance mascots Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski started the ball rolling with a deferential post-election junket to Mar-a-Lago. Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong chimed in by throttling stories critical of MAGA prerogatives—and then announced an absurd AI feature that allowed readers to clock and correct alleged bias in the paper’s coverage, thereby downgrading the chronicle of current events into a choose-your-own adventure computer app for irate ideologues. It was a bit like the Weimar press greeting the Reichstag fire with a campaign to decriminalize arson.
Now, ABC News, a subsidiary of the Disney Corporation, has accelerated the quisling march of mainstream journalism into inert MAGA observance with a $15 million settlement of a defamation suit that Trump brought against the network after George Stephanopoulos characterized Trump as having been found “liable for rape” in E. Jean Carroll’s successful civil suit against him. ABC and Stephanopoulos will further oblige the incoming Trump White House with an on-air apology for the anchor’s remarks.
There’s almost no legal justification for the agreement. Under New York law, Carroll’s claim that Trump had digitally penetrated her by force fell short of the full definition of rape, but Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued a statement holding that this was largely a distinction without a difference. “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan’s statement read in part.
Under the standards of libel, Stephanopoulos’s comments clearly were fair game. For public figures such as Trump, a libel action has to prove reckless disregard of the truth or actual malice on the part of a defendant. In this case, Stephanopoulos was plainly summarizing the sense of the judge’s own reasoning in the Carroll complaint; a robust defense by ABC would have both vindicated plain-spoken coverage of Trump and his movement and marked a key reversal of the industry-wide swoon into Trump-appeasing prostration.
Instead, the network opted to roll over. The bulk of the settlement will be a donation to the Trump Presidential Library—its own grim joke, being a text-driven monument to a post-literate chief executive who hopes to festoon his incoming cabinet with 15 Fox News personalities (at the present count). But the larger point of the settlement is to telegraph to the incoming Trump administration that the network will be standing alongside Soon-Shiong, Scarborough, Brzezinski and a host of others in eager solicitude before Trump-sanctioned narratives and policy initiatives. The nominal cost of the settlement, after all, is a rounding error for the Disney Corporation, and will likely come under the provisions of ABC’s libel insurance anyway. In other high-profile network television libel actions, such as Gen. William Westmoreland’s complaint against CBS News, settlements haven’t involved cash payouts beyond legal fees—in this context, ABC’s donation to the Trump library is akin to the donations other media players are doling out to the Trump inauguration committee—the standard pay-to-play backsheesh extracted by corrupt authoritarian regimes on the make.
This is all to say nothing, of course, of the freestanding media complex that already functions as wall-to-wall infomercial programing for the MAGA movement. In a weekend exchange on the cursed social media platform X, its Trump-addled owner, Elon Musk, largely conceded that his 2022 purchase of the site was instrumental in Trump’s reelection. (That’s on top of Musk’s direct outlay ofa quarter of a billion dollars to Trump-aligned super PACs in the 2024 cycle.) And Fox News is far more than a conduit for Trump cabinet recruits; the network was forced to engineer a far more consequential $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems last year over its barrage of lies about the company’s supposed role in brokering the theft of the 2020 election for Joe Biden. The second Trump administration is poised to be a grim case study in the complete absence of fallout from that agreement; the still wildly profitable Fox operation will continue to enjoy privileged access to the White House, as Trump himself studiously sets about rewriting the history surrounding his failed coup on January 6. He’s already pledged to extend pardons to convicted January 6 defendants at the outset of his term, and his election will likely continue to insulate him from the legal consequences of his illegal power grab. (Here the country’s decrepit political-and-media complex has been shown up by South Korea, which wasted no time in impeaching President Yoon Suk Yeol after his failed declaration of martial law, and driving his ruling party from power.)
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Trump himself is still pursuing a plainly frivolous $1 billion lawsuit against CBS News for supposedly biased editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and had threatened to get ABC’s license suspended for fact-checking his replies in his debate with Harris. (Indeed, in a recent Mar-a-Lago news conference, he threatened to sue Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register for publishing survey results mistakenly showing Trump trailing Harris in the Hawkeye State—alongside a threatened suit against Washington Post political reporter Bob Woodward and a reiterated bid to sue the Pulitzer Peace Prize committee.)
Trump’s example of strongman journalistic bullying is also gaining wider traction in MAGAland. The lawyer for Trump’s embattled defense secretary nominee, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has threatened to seek a civil extortion action against the victim whom Hegseth was accused of sexually assaulting at a California conference of conservative activists—and lofted libel threats against Vanity Fair and The New York Times for publishing pieces about Hegseth’s drinking and marital difficulties. Kash Patel, Trump’s vengeance-minded pick to head the FBI, has threatened to sue former Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye for referring to him as a delusional liar in an MSNBC appearance. Patel also pledged on a 2023 podcast interview with Steve Bannon that “we will go out and find the conspirators not just in the government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
These quests for payback from a critical press are very much of a piece with Trump-driven efforts to strip out key bulwarks of media independence. The lame-duck Congress appears to be letting a federal shield law to safeguard journalists against naming their sources fall by the wayside. Trump and his allies will continue pressing to get the courts to “loosen up libel law”—which is to say, to overturn the high standards for libel and defamation cases set out in the landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling Sullivan v. The New York Times. And Trump has appointed media-baiting attorney Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission and serial election-denialist Kari Lake to chair Voice of America. It’s not yet clear how far Trump apparatchiks will go in trashing whatever remains of a principled, independent media in the flailing American republic. Yet, regardless of their track record, many of them may be able to add cushy sinecures as ABC commentators to their résumés.
Like all sequels, the incoming Trump administration promises a grislier body count driven by ever more implausible narrative arcs. A prime case in point has been the media’s repellent capitulation to the Trumpian ethos of impunity for the powerful, well in advance of the president-elect’s inauguration next month. MSNBC’s erstwhile resistance mascots Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski started the ball rolling with a deferential post-election junket to Mar-a-Lago. Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong chimed in by throttling stories critical of MAGA prerogatives—and then announced an absurd AI feature that allowed readers to clock and correct alleged bias in the paper’s coverage, thereby downgrading the chronicle of current events into a choose-your-own adventure computer app for irate ideologues. It was a bit like the Weimar press greeting the Reichstag fire with a campaign to decriminalize arson.
Now, ABC News, a subsidiary of the Disney Corporation, has accelerated the quisling march of mainstream journalism into inert MAGA observance with a $15 million settlement of a defamation suit that Trump brought against the network after George Stephanopoulos characterized Trump as having been found “liable for rape” in E. Jean Carroll’s successful civil suit against him. ABC and Stephanopoulos will further oblige the incoming Trump White House with an on-air apology for the anchor’s remarks.
There’s almost no legal justification for the agreement. Under New York law, Carroll’s claim that Trump had digitally penetrated her by force fell short of the full definition of rape, but Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued a statement holding that this was largely a distinction without a difference. “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan’s statement read in part.
Under the standards of libel, Stephanopoulos’s comments clearly were fair game. For public figures such as Trump, a libel action has to prove reckless disregard of the truth or actual malice on the part of a defendant. In this case, Stephanopoulos was plainly summarizing the sense of the judge’s own reasoning in the Carroll complaint; a robust defense by ABC would have both vindicated plain-spoken coverage of Trump and his movement and marked a key reversal of the industry-wide swoon into Trump-appeasing prostration.
Instead, the network opted to roll over. The bulk of the settlement will be a donation to the Trump Presidential Library—its own grim joke, being a text-driven monument to a post-literate chief executive who hopes to festoon his incoming cabinet with 15 Fox News personalities (at the present count). But the larger point of the settlement is to telegraph to the incoming Trump administration that the network will be standing alongside Soon-Shiong, Scarborough, Brzezinski and a host of others in eager solicitude before Trump-sanctioned narratives and policy initiatives. The nominal cost of the settlement, after all, is a rounding error for the Disney Corporation, and will likely come under the provisions of ABC’s libel insurance anyway. In other high-profile network television libel actions, such as Gen. William Westmoreland’s complaint against CBS News, settlements haven’t involved cash payouts beyond legal fees—in this context, ABC’s donation to the Trump library is akin to the donations other media players are doling out to the Trump inauguration committee—the standard pay-to-play backsheesh extracted by corrupt authoritarian regimes on the make.
This is all to say nothing, of course, of the freestanding media complex that already functions as wall-to-wall infomercial programing for the MAGA movement. In a weekend exchange on the cursed social media platform X, its Trump-addled owner, Elon Musk, largely conceded that his 2022 purchase of the site was instrumental in Trump’s reelection. (That’s on top of Musk’s direct outlay ofa quarter of a billion dollars to Trump-aligned super PACs in the 2024 cycle.) And Fox News is far more than a conduit for Trump cabinet recruits; the network was forced to engineer a far more consequential $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems last year over its barrage of lies about the company’s supposed role in brokering the theft of the 2020 election for Joe Biden. The second Trump administration is poised to be a grim case study in the complete absence of fallout from that agreement; the still wildly profitable Fox operation will continue to enjoy privileged access to the White House, as Trump himself studiously sets about rewriting the history surrounding his failed coup on January 6. He’s already pledged to extend pardons to convicted January 6 defendants at the outset of his term, and his election will likely continue to insulate him from the legal consequences of his illegal power grab. (Here the country’s decrepit political-and-media complex has been shown up by South Korea, which wasted no time in impeaching President Yoon Suk Yeol after his failed declaration of martial law, and driving his ruling party from power.)
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January 2025 Issue
Trump himself is still pursuing a plainly frivolous $1 billion lawsuit against CBS News for supposedly biased editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and had threatened to get ABC’s license suspended for fact-checking his replies in his debate with Harris. (Indeed, in a recent Mar-a-Lago news conference, he threatened to sue Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register for publishing survey results mistakenly showing Trump trailing Harris in the Hawkeye State—alongside a threatened suit against Washington Post political reporter Bob Woodward and a reiterated bid to sue the Pulitzer Peace Prize committee.)
Trump’s example of strongman journalistic bullying is also gaining wider traction in MAGAland. The lawyer for Trump’s embattled defense secretary nominee, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has threatened to seek a civil extortion action against the victim whom Hegseth was accused of sexually assaulting at a California conference of conservative activists—and lofted libel threats against Vanity Fair and The New York Times for publishing pieces about Hegseth’s drinking and marital difficulties. Kash Patel, Trump’s vengeance-minded pick to head the FBI, has threatened to sue former Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye for referring to him as a delusional liar in an MSNBC appearance. Patel also pledged on a 2023 podcast interview with Steve Bannon that “we will go out and find the conspirators not just in the government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
These quests for payback from a critical press are very much of a piece with Trump-driven efforts to strip out key bulwarks of media independence. The lame-duck Congress appears to be letting a federal shield law to safeguard journalists against naming their sources fall by the wayside. Trump and his allies will continue pressing to get the courts to “loosen up libel law”—which is to say, to overturn the high standards for libel and defamation cases set out in the landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling Sullivan v. The New York Times. And Trump has appointed media-baiting attorney Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission and serial election-denialist Kari Lake to chair Voice of America. It’s not yet clear how far Trump apparatchiks will go in trashing whatever remains of a principled, independent media in the flailing American republic. Yet, regardless of their track record, many of them may be able to add cushy sinecures as ABC commentators to their résumés.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Lehmann
Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was formerly editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).
