Article in The Nation by Chris Lehmann. 12/17/24
Headline: “Trump’s Attack on the Free Press Is Just Getting Started “
Subhead: “The president-elect’s recent settlement with ABC News is an early volley in an all-out MAGA war against media independence.”
“. . .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.”
“. . . 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”
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-abc-settlement/
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Article in Common Dreams by Robert Reich, 12/17/24
Headline: “ABC News Shows What It Looks Like When Corporate Media Bows to Trump”
Subhead: “We are beginning to see this all over the U.S. political-economic system — giant corporations and hugely wealthy people going out of their way to appease King Trump even in advance of his coronation.”
“ABC shouldn’t have agreed to settle the defamation case Trump brought against it — handing him $15 million for his presidential “library” (whatever monument that turns out to be) and another million for his legal fees, along with an apology.
It shouldn’t have, first, because the standard for defamation of a public figure requires that a plaintiff prove that the defendant acted with “actual malice” — that is, knew their statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
“But when on March 10, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos asserted that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, there’s zero evidence that Stephanopoulos knew it to be false or was acting with reckless disregard for the truth.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-attack-on-free-press
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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Staff, 12/17/24
Headline: “Questions ABC News Should Answer Following the $16 Million Trump Settlement”
Subhead: “The decision to cave and apologize has unnerved American journalists. The network owes them an explanation.”
As someone who practiced press law for more than twenty years, and served as a senior executive of news organizations for just as long, I was shocked by the decision of ABC News last week to pay $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s libel case over George Stephanopoulos’s This Week broadcast in March. The shock came, and still lingers, because I—and every experienced press lawyer not involved in the case with whom I have discussed it—considered the case one in which ABC was likely to eventually prevail.
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/questions-abc-news-should-answer-16-million-trump- settlement.php
