The short answer is that the future is already here. We’re not talking about the mainstream media. We’re talking about the establishment media. And ABC News is the establishment media, So is the New York Times and the Washington Post and CBS and NBC and Fox and the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times.
Donald Trump now dominates the establishment in the United States, and ABC News has done what the establishment media has always done when confronted with power: They recognize that there is a new sheriff in town and behave accordingly.
It’s silly to be shocked by the fact that ABC – here, you can read parent company Disney, which learned a thing or two in its dealings with Sheriff DeSantis down in Florida – has settled the defamation case Trump filed. It is being speculated that ABC didn’t want to risk testing the Supreme Court’s Sullivan v. New York Times decision in a hair-splitting case over the definition of the word “rape.” That may even be the case, at least in part. But the larger question doesn’t have to do with defamation, and the person who knows this and has told us as much is Donald Trump himself.
The question after the ABC News settlement with Trump is whether the establishment media will pull back from its coverage of Trump, even if his lies will be pointed out as they have been in the past.
Trump has long said that he will “open up our libel laws” so newspapers and broadcast news won’t be protected by the strictures of the Sullivan decision, which requires that a public figure, especially a politician, bringing a lawsuit must prove actual malice, meaning that the news outlet either knew a statement was false or recklessly disregarded evidence of its falsehood in publishing it. One of Trump’s big applause lines at his rallies during the campaign was when he said he would take on the media and change the libel laws. His crowds may not have known the details behind the Sullivan decision, but they didn’t have to. Trump guided his crowds’ attention to the media enclosure where the television cameras were set up at nearly every rally and called the people trapped there “the enemy.” The crowds loved it. People were filmed at Trump rallies walking up to the media enclosures and shaking their fists at the reporters and camera operators. I saw this happen as far back as March of 2016 when I attended a Trump rally in Bethpage, New York, on Long Island.
ABC News had cameras and reporters at plenty of Trump rallies. They’ve known that they had a target on their back for years.
But the establishment media hasn’t needed to know that it is a target to make sure it behaves itself in the presence of power. As far back as Richard Nixon, the establishment media soft-pedaled reporting the facts surrounding the Watergate break-in during Nixon’s campaign for president. On the first day of the Republican National Convention in 1972, it was reported that some of the money found on the burglars passed through the hands of one of Nixon’s campaign finance chairmen, Maurice Stans, who was present at the convention. No questions were asked by establishment media outlets of Stans about giving the funds to the burglars. Stans would later plead guilty to having given campaign funds to G. Gordon Liddy, one of the burglars.
In 2002 and 2003, the establishment media, chiefly the New York Times, was guilty of repeating Bush administration lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that did not exist in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In fact, even after the U.S. invaded in 2003 and no evidence of WMDs was found, you would be hard-pressed to find mention in the establishment media that the entire basis for the invasion of Iraq had collapsed ignominiously. The establishment media just went on reporting on the war as if it had been completely justified.
During the 2016 campaign, the New York Times published countless stories about Hillary Clinton’s “emails,” an entirely made-up “controversy” that was stoked by Donald Trump throughout the campaign, while the paper made far less of the more than two dozen women who had charged Trump with sexual abuse and harassment. The establishment media reported on Clinton’s so-called email problem throughout the campaign, while it largely ignored Trump’s invitation to Russia—“Russia, if you’re listening…” — to look into what happened to Hillary’s emails.
During the 2024 campaign, we were treated to more sanewashing of the constant flow of Trump’s lies and exaggerations that he repeated almost daily at his rallies and other public appearances. The so-called “age issue” was applied almost entirely to Joe Biden, who was 81, while the establishment press left Trump’s age, 77, pretty much alone.
I could go on, but I’m sure you can fill in the blanks with your own memories of the lopsided way the election was covered. Little was made of Trump’s continual garbling of sentences and loss of train of thought and his incredible barrage of lies, while the press put under a microscope every syllable uttered by Kamala Harris. Through it all, Trump accused the establishment media of bias, even claiming that the media was engaged in “rigging” the election in favor of Harris. All of it without so much as a shred of evidence.
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In the past, the establishment media has recovered from the mistakes it made in its initially lax coverage of Watergate, its failure to closely question the “evidence” asserted to justify the war on Iraq, and other lapses in the way it covered American politics and national affairs.
But what about this time? Is ABC News showing the way to the future by “obeying in advance,” to use the words of Timothy Snyder, who has written extensively about how nations descend into dictatorships and authoritarianism? Already MSNBC stars Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezenski have flown down to Mar-a-Lago for what appeared to be an ass-kissing session with Trump. Debra O’Connell, who oversees the ABC News division for Disney, was reported to have dined with Trump’s former campaign chairman and newly-appointed chief of staff, Susie Wiles, in advance of the settlement agreement between ABC News and Trump. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, and Mark Zuckerberg, who sits atop Meta, owner of Facebook, have each pledged one million dollars to the Trump inaugural committee, which does not have to report what it does with the money it collects, or even that it is used for events surrounding the inauguration. Trump’s last inaugural committee was found to have funneled millions to a friend of Melania Trump for “planning” of inaugural events that may or may not have taken place. The friend of Melania established her company only weeks before Trump’s inaugural committee paid her the money.
The question after the ABC News settlement with Trump is whether the establishment media will pull back from its coverage of Trump, even if his lies will be pointed out as they have been in the past. The Washington Post famously counted more than 30,000 lies uttered by Trump during his first tenure in the White House. After Bezos’ pay-off to Trump’s inaugural committee, will there be another lie-o-meter kept by the Washington Post?
I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Trump has threatened the broadcast licenses of the major television networks and has threatened to file more defamation cases. He already has filed a lawsuit against CBS News alleging that the network “interfered” in the election by editing an interview with Kamala Harris so that she would appear in a better light than she would have if the interview had been broadcast unedited. This lawsuit would be laughable were it not for the fact that Trump went judge-shopping and filed it in Amarillo, Texas, where there is only one judge in the federal court district of Northern Texas, Matthew Kacsmaryk, who has made himself famous for putting his thumb down on the scales of justice for conservatives in case after case.
If past is prologue, people who want unadulterated news about the coming Trump administration will probably have to listen to podcasts and watch independent political coverage on YouTube and read independent blogs on the internet.
Whether the First Amendment will survive another Trump administration is the question we should be asking.
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