Mainstream media organizations are continuing to capitulate to Donald Trump and the Republican Party following his election win, giving in to legal threats and catering to the right in coverage.
The First Amendment offers broad protections of speech, particularly the right to a free press, but the Trump team has adopted the tactic of using defamation lawsuits to combat reporting. Timothy Parlatore, a lawyer for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to be secretary of defense, has threatened lawsuits against The New Yorker and Vanity Fair for articles about Hegseth and allegations of assault.
Similarly, Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to be FBI director, has threatened suits against journalists for reporting accurate information about Trump.
ABC News is the latest news organization to buckle to Trump’s legal threats. The news organization, which is owned by Disney, announced on Saturday that it would pay out $15 million in a donation to Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation suit brought against it by Trump.
Trump alleged that ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos defamed him when he said that “judges and two separate juries have found Trump liable for rape.” The jury found Trump was liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.
However, Judge Lewis Kaplan later expanded on the finding. Here’s Mother Jones:
That the jurors did not find that Carroll had proven rape, Kaplan explained, “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Experts on media law told The New York Times that traditionally media outlets fight suits harder than ABC had chosen to do. By settling, Trump also avoids having to sit for a deposition, which was planned for this week.
Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who was the interview subject when Stephanopoulos made his remark, cheered on the media backsliding.
“Looks like Trump just turned Stephanopoulos into the $15 million Art of the Apology,” she wrote.
Other news outlets are caving in.
Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, has announced that his paper will include a “bias meter,” reflecting longtime conservative complaints about a liberal bias. Soon-Shiong also hired conservative CNN pundit Scott Jennings to be a part of the paper’s editorial board. Jennings has made a name for himself at the network for defending Trump, in one instance excusing reports that Trump had praised Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
The L.A. Times, along with The Washington Post (owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos), both spiked endorsements of Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the election.
The hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago following his win and have angrily defended their trip on-air.
Media and tech moguls like Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and X’s Elon Musk have publicly praised Trump’s win (Musk also spent millions to help engineer it), raising serious concerns about the impartiality of the platforms the men own.
For his part, Trump appears to love the new hands-off approach.
“The media’s tamed down a little bit,” Trump said Thursday while appearing at the New York Stock Exchange. “They like us much better now, I think.”
At a press conference on Monday, Trump threatened future defamation lawsuits against the media. Among his targets are The Des Moines Register, “60 Minutes,” reporter Bob Woodward, and the Pulitzer Prizes in retaliation for reporting by The Washington Post and New York on Russia’s role in attempting to influence the 2016 election.
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“It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else, but I have to do it. It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press,” Trump said. “Our press is very corrupt, almost as corrupt as our elections.”
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