Trump’s Attack on the Free Press Is Just Getting Started

Like all sequels, the incoming Trump administration promises a more gruesome death toll driven by increasingly implausible narratives. A prime example was the media’s repulsive capitulation to the Trumpian ethos of impunity for powerful figures well before the president-elect’s inauguration next month. Former MSNBC resistance mascots Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzienski started with a respectable post-election youth in Mar-a-Lago. Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong chimed in restraining stories criticizing MAGA’s prerogatives— and then announced an absurd AI feature that allowed readers clock and correct the assumed bias in newspaper coverage, thereby turning the current events chronicle into a computer adventure program of choice for enraged ideologues. It was like how the Weimar press met 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 to the inert preservation of MAGA with settlement of $15 million defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the network after George Stephanopoulos described Trump as “rape-obsessed” in a successful civil suit against his E. Jean Carroll. ABC and Stephanopoulos will issue an on-air apology to the Trump White House for the host’s remarks.

There is practically no legal basis for the agreement. Under New York law, Carol’s claim that Trump forcibly penetrated her through a digital system does not meet the full definition of rape, but Judge Lewis A. Chaplain issued a statement suggesting that it was largely a distinction without a difference. “The fact that Ms. Carroll was unable to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of New York’s criminal law does not mean that she was unable to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her, as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ . Kaplan said in part.

By defamation standards, Stephanopoulos’s comments were clearly fair game. In the case of public figures such as Trump, a defamation action must prove reckless disregard for the truth or actual malicious intent on the part of the defendant. In this case, Stephanopoulos clearly summarized the thrust of the judge’s own reasoning in Carroll’s complaint; a robust defense by ABC would vindicate the overt coverage of Trump and his movement and mark a key reversal of the industry-wide swoon into prostration that appeased Trump.

Instead, the network decided to roll over. A major part of the settlement will be a donation to the Trump Presidential Library — its own dark joke, which is a textual monument to the illiterate executive hoping to decorate his new office 15 Fox News personalities (according to the current count). But the main purpose of the settlement is to telegraph to the incoming Trump administration that the network will stand with Sun-Shiong, Scarborough, Brzeski and scores of others in their eagerness to tackle Trump-sanctioned narratives and policy initiatives. After all, the face value of the deal is a rounding error for the Disney corporation and is likely covered by ABC’s defamation insurance anyway. In other high-profile defamation lawsuits on network television, such as General William Westmoreland’s complaint against CBS News, settlements does not involve cash payments aside from legal fees — in this context, ABC’s donation to the Trump library is similar to donations made by other media players Trump Inauguration Committee—the standard pay-to-play extracted by corrupt authoritarian regimes.

Of course, this is all, not to mention the stand-alone media complex, which already functions as an information and advertising program for the MAGA movement. In a weekend exchange on the cursed social media platform X, its Trump-suffering owner Elon Musk largely admitted that his acquisition of the site in 2022 played an important role in Trump’s re-election. (This is in addition to Musk’s direct costsa quarter of a billion dollars to Trump-linked super PACs in the 2024 cycle) And Fox News is much more than a conduit for Trump cabinet recruits; the network was forced to develop a much more effective one $787 million defamation settlement of Dominion Voting Systems last year over a barrage of lies about the company’s alleged role in brokering the 2020 election for Joe Biden. A second Trump administration is poised to be a bleak case study in the complete absence of results from this deal; the still highly profitable Fox operation will continue to enjoy privileged access to the White House as Trump himself diligently sets about rewriting history around his failed January 6 coup. He has already promised to pardon those convicted on January 6 at the start of his term, and his election is likely to continue to insulate him from the legal consequences of the illegal power grab. (Here the country’s collapsed political and media complex was shown by South Korea, which wasted no time on the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol after his failed declaration of martial law and the removal of his ruling party from power.)

Trump himself is still pursuing a a clearly frivolous $1 billion lawsuit against CBS News for allegedly biased editing a 60 minutes interview with Kamal Harris, and threatened get ABC’s license suspended for fact-checking his responses in the Harris debate. (Indeed, at a recent press conference in Mar-a-Lago, he threatened to sue Iowa socialite Anne Seltzer and Des Moines Register for publication of survey results falsely showing Trump trailing Harris in the Hawkeye state, along with a threatened lawsuit against Washington Post political reporter Bob Woodward and a renewed attempt to sue the Pulitzer Peace Prize committee.)

You can also cite an example of Trump’s journalistic bullying gains widespread power in MAGAland. A lawyer for Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Fox News host Pete Hegsett, threatened to initiate a civil suit against a victim who Hegseth accused of sexual assault at a California conservative activist conference and made defamation threats Fair of vanity and The New York Times for publishing articles on Hegsett’s drinking and marital difficulties. Cash Patel, Trump vengeful choice to head the FBIthreatened to sue Mike Pence’s former aide Olivia Troy after she called him a lying liar in an appearance on MSNBC. Patel also promised 2023 Steve Bannon Podcast Interview that “we will go out and find the conspirators not only in the government but also in the media. Yes, we’re going to go after people in the media who lied about American citizens helping Joe Biden rig the presidential election.”

This pursuit of retribution from a critical press is largely tied to Trump’s efforts to dismantle key bastions of media independence. A lame-duck Congress appears to be allowing a federal shield law to protect journalists from naming their sources fall by the wayside. Trump and his allies will continue to push for the courts to “loosen up defamation law” — meaning that reverse the high standards in libel and defamation cases set forth in a landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision Sullivan v. The New York Times. And Trump appointed media harassment attorney Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission and serial election denialist Kari Lake to lead “Voice of America”. It remains unclear how far Trump’s apparatchiks will go in destroying what remains of a principled independent media in the faltering American republic. However, whatever their track record, many can add cushy sinecures as ABC commentators to their resumes.