ABC bends the knee

Corporate media is surrendering already.

A still from the interview that got ABC sued.

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Since the election, plenty of the richest among us have rushed to curry favor with Donald Trump by showering him with cash.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerburg is giving Trump $1 million for his inauguration, as is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Amazon, which will also stream the ceremony on Prime. But perhaps even more galling is ABC’s move to settle an absurd defamation lawsuit brought by Trump over George Stephanopoulos’s completely defensible on-air statement that Trump had been found liable for rape.

Trump's lawsuit against ABC is not the flex he thinks it is

ABC will donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library — a thing that has not yet been built and currently exists only as a website maintained by the National Archives. The network also agreed to pay $1 million toward Trump’s lawyer fees, continuing Trump’s streak of never paying for his own legal bills. And ABC and Stephanopoulos pledged to make a statement saying they “regret” the remarks.

It’s a bad omen for mainstream media coverage of Trump 2.0 and speaks to the importance of independent outlets that won’t be so easily intimidated.

Splitting hairs

Trump’s lawsuit rested on the incredibly flimsy argument that it defamed him to say he was found liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll when he was actually found liable for forced digital penetration. But Stephanopoulos’s comments were consistent with how the presiding judge described the case.

Under New York’s criminal laws, rape requires forced penile presentation. However, the judge in that case explicitly stated that “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.’”

Honestly, this should have settled the matter. Public figures like Trump are held to a higher standard of proof in defamation cases, so he should have been required to prove that ABC and Stephanopoulos knew calling Trump a rapist was a lie or had recklessly failed to investigate whether that was true.

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But as much as Stephanopoulos’s defense seemed like a slam dunk, a couple of things happened to alter the trajectory of the case. First, District Judge Cecilia Altonaga, a George W. Bush appointee, refused to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit. Next, of course, Trump won the 2024 election and has made it exceedingly clear that he will spend his second term going after corporations — particularly media companies — that he doesn’t like.

Indeed, Trump still has a separate lawsuit against CBS, accusing them of election interference for an interview with Kamala Harris he alleges was misleadingly edited to show her in a better light. (Editing interviews is in fact standard practice for shows like 60 Minutes.) CBS has a motion to dismiss pending, but Trump filed the case in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, where he was guaranteed to draw his own hard-right appointee, Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk is the only judge in that jurisdiction and is best known for giving conservatives whatever they want, which doesn’t bode well for CBS.

Given that the ABC lawsuit seemed like an easy win for the network, the settlement feels like something designed to curry favor with Trump as he enters office. Debra O’Connell, who oversees ABC News, already had dinner with Trump’s new chief of staff. Put it all together and it’s hard to have confidence in the network’s commitment to hard-hitting coverage of his second administration.

Nancy Mace's never-ending chase for 15 more minutes of fame

ABC already has company in that space, joining Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who made a suck-up visit to Mar-a-Lago because they fear retribution from Trump. Under Bezos’s rule, the Washington Post declined to endorse anyone in the 2024 election, a huge gift from a paper whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, has interfered with his own paper’s reporting multiple times, killing stories unfavorable to Trump. And back in 2022, CNN fired CEO Jeff Zucker, replacing him with Chris Licht to ensure CNN’s coverage of Trump was “more neutral.”

So much of this feels like what historian Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance.” ABC is giving immense power to Trump before he even takes office. They’ve sent a message to other media companies that the best move is to comply with him, to not report critically because that might result in a lawsuit.

There’s the possibility that ABC’s move here was to avoid Trump using the case to get New York Times v. Sullivan reversed. That ruling created a higher standard of proof for public figures to prevail in a defamation lawsuit.

Chris Wray folds like cheap suit. Don’t be Chris Wray.

Trump hates Sullivan and has declared for years that he would “open up our libel law” to sue media companies without needing that higher standard of proof. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas have already indicated they are open to overturning the case. There’s the possibility that, had the ABC case made it all the way to the US Supreme Court, there would be five votes throw out Sullivan.

If that happened, reporting critical of Trump or anyone in his orbit would grind to a halt. By holding news media to the ordinary defamation standard, which requires a plaintiff to prove only that a statement was false, outlets would be at such risk that they’d pull back from reporting. But regardless of the motives behind the move, media experts have weighed in to say that this settlement represents an “an awful precedent” that bends the knee to Trump before he’s even sworn in.

Stephanopoulos scrubbed this X account after news of the settlement broke.

Trump’s playbook here is the same as authoritarian strongman Victor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary. Orban has comprehensively attacked media outlets, filing lawsuits, and starving them of public advertising dollars unless they displayed sufficient loyalty. We’ve already seen that a willingness to be a mouthpiece for Trump pays off handsomely, with the president-elect naming 10 people from Fox News to fill positions in his administration.

It’s troubling to consider what the media will look like when it shifts to the state-run — or at least state-approved — model that Trump clearly craves. Imagine a press briefing filled only with MAGA-friendly outlets and without mainstream ones like the New York Times, Politico, CNN, and BBC. Trump toyed with this model during his first term and his transition team has indicated they plan to go further down the road of boosting rightwing cranks during his second one.

Trump's corruption of the DOJ goes much deeper than Gaetz

Meanwhile, Trump and other people in his orbit have threatened to file even more defamation cases. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, has already said he would file defamation lawsuits against media outlets who have reported critically on him. Kash Patel, who will be heading the FBI, has made it very clear he’ll weaponize the FBI and the Department of Justice to “go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media. We’re going to come after you.”

Trump can also weaponize the FCC by denying broadcast licenses to media he dislikes and relaxing ownership rules. This would allow companies like Sinclair Broadcast Group, which already owns roughly 200 stations, to buy up more local stations. It could also block mergers that Trump doesn’t like. Back in 2017, he tried to prevent a merger between AT&T and Time Warner for no discernible reason save for his anger about it.

Another factor here is that media ownership has been consolidated and is now controlled by billionaires. It’s not just Bezos and Soon-Shiong. Fox’s Rubert Murdoch has a habit of buying up media outlets. More than half the newspapers in the country are owned by one investment firm, Alden Global Capital. There are ultra-rich people eager to have Trump smooth the way for them to accumulate even more wealth while having no regulatory oversight.

ABC’s early capitulation to Trump is disconcerting on multiple fronts. It diminishes trust in media and sets a terrible precedent for other outlets. Meanwhile, Trump not only suffers no consequences but is showered with money. The situation underscores that independent coverage is needed more than ever to hold power accountable.

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