A low, low point for
ABC News
ABC News not only
settled a defamation suit with Trump. It paid out $15 million. What?
December
16, 2024 at 2:35 p.m. EST40 minutes ago
Donald Trump expressed a lament on the campaign trail in February 2016. Guys like him
have “no chance of winning” libel suits against the likes of the New York Times
and The Post, he said at a rally in Fort Worth. “We’re going to open up those
libel laws,” he said.
Well, Trump never succeeded in opening up those libel laws.
Then again, maybe he didn’t need to: In a stunner news blast on Saturday afternoon,
ABC News agreed to settle a defamation case from Trump, a deal that included
this statement from the network: “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret
statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George
Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”
The crow-eating statement wasn’t the most gobsmacking
aspect of the settlement. That would be the $15 million that ABC News agreed to
pay toward a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for
[Trump], as Presidents of the United States of America have established in the
past.” ABC News will also shell out $1 million for Trump’s legal fees.
Meaning: ABC News, a founding member of the mainstream
media, will also serve as a founding member of the Donald J. Trump Presidential
Library, or some such. That’s how big a chest-beating, lectern-pounding,
crowd-pleasing victory the president-elect scored on an otherwise sleepy
December weekend.
ABC News will never live down this capitulation. Never.
To read the Trump complaint in the case — Trump v.
American Broadcasting Companies, filed in a Miami federal court — is
to suppose a journalistic atrocity. At issue is a contentious George
Stephanopoulos interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) in which the
host pressed the lawmaker on her reaction to developments in Trump’s litigation
with author and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. Stephanopoulos pointed out
that Mace had given “courageous” testimony about
being a rape victim before winning election to Congress.
“Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury,”
Stephanopoulos said, referring to the Carroll litigation. How could she justify
endorsing Trump in his 2024 presidential campaign?
The interview wasted no time veering into utter hostility,
with Mace telling Stephanopoulos that he was “shaming” her. The ABC News
fixture kept at it. “I’m asking you a question about why you endorsed someone
who’s been found liable for rape. Just answer the question,” Stephanopoulos
said. It was one of those Sunday TV clashes that kept people clicking into the
workweek.
It took Trump’s lawyers eight days to whip up a 20-page
defamation complaint, which drives at an error in Stephanopoulos’s
interrogation: The jury in Carroll’s civil case against Trump — there were
actually two such cases — found that Carroll had not proved
that Trump had “raped” her. It did find that he had sexually
abused her. Yet Stephanopoulos repeatedly fired questions at Mace that were
premised on jury findings that Trump had raped Carroll. Trump’s complaint
claims that Stephanopoulos erroneously stated that Trump “was ‘found liable for
rape’ more than ten times.” (Emphases in original.)
In a motion to dismiss the case, lawyers for ABC News
argued that Stephanopoulos’s claims were “substantially true,” a legal standard
that allows for inaccuracies of narrow bandwidth, so long as the gist of the
segment remains accurate. Key to this defense are the words of Judge Lewis A.
Kaplan, who made a ruling in posttrial proceedings that was central to both
Stephanopoulos’s interview with Mace and, ultimately, the legal defense of ABC
News. As The Post’s Aaron Blake explained at the time,
Kaplan reasoned that the jury found Trump liable for rape under a common
understanding of the offense. However, until January 2024, New
York state law defined “rape” as penetration of the vagina by the penis.
“The jury’s negative answer to Question 1 means only that
the jury was unpersuaded that Mr. Trump’s penis penetrated Ms. Carroll’s
vagina. It does not mean that he did not forcibly insert his fingers into her —
that he “raped” her in the broader sense of that word,” wrote Kaplan.
Pause for a second to consider the 5,000th reason Trump is
not a normal politician. Which of his peers would choose to file a defamation
complaint that invited further consideration of precisely how he was found
liable for sexually abusing a woman?
ABC News displayed Blake’s story on Kaplan’s findings, and
Stephanopoulos explicitly referenced the granular stuff. “Can we pull up the
Washington Post headline right there? In fact, it has been shown to be rape.
The judge affirmed that it was, in fact, rape,” said the host.
Not good enough, ruled Chief U.S. District Judge Cecilia M.
Altonaga in an order rejecting ABC News’s motion to dismiss the case. “This
ostensible ‘clarification’ occurred late in the segment and did not include any
further explanation; viewers were simply treated to a ten-second glimpse of a
headline and partially blurred text, with no mention of Judge Kaplan by name or
any description of why his description of the verdict differed from the jury’s
actual verdict as recounted by Mace,” wrote Altonaga, who also emphasized that
the “substantial truth” test applied not to Stephanopoulos’s description of
Trump’s conduct but rather to his abridgment of jury findings. She denied the
motion to dismiss in a July order.
Court filings establish an important contrast in the
conduct of ABC News in this case. According to Trump’s complaint, his
representatives contacted the network in pursuit of a retraction of the “false
and defamatory statements” as well as an apology. ABC News didn’t retract,
didn’t apologize and didn’t “direct or request that Stephanopoulos correct the
various false and defamatory statements.” ABC News did change a headline atop a
“related” article, according to the complaint.
What we have here is standard-issue intransigence by an
American media outlet. At industry conferences over the years, I’ve listened to
editor after editor respond to criticisms about news accuracy by mouthing some
variation of the theme that when we screw it up, we’ll publish a
correction. Nonsense: Altogether too often, reporters and editors squirm
out of such obligations in favor of stealth corrections or concerted
stonewalling.
And here’s the peculiar dimension of this whole affair: The
posture of ABC News progressed from unreasonably dismissive (rejecting
legitimate demands for correction) to unreasonably accommodating (giving away
the store to Trump via $15 million, a note of contrition and so on).
It’s unclear how that happened, but keep in mind that when
high-profile defamation cases reach crunch time, it’s not necessarily the
journalists who are calling the shots. ABC News, remember, is owned by the Walt
Disney Co. “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to
dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” reads an ABC News statement. I asked for
additional comment and haven’t received a response.
ABC News does its business under the world-class
protections of the First Amendment. One of those protections is articulated in
the Supreme Court case Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, which noted
that libel law in this country “overlooks minor inaccuracies and concentrates upon
substantial truth.” What’s more, Trump would have had to prove that
ABC News acted with knowledge of the false statements or proceeded with
reckless disregard of their truth or falsity, per the landmark Supreme Court
ruling New York Times v. Sullivan.
Accompanying the luxury of those protections is the
obligation to actually use them. As opposed to bailing on a
winnable case from a man with a history of exploiting the civil justice system.
