How do journalists deal with Donald Trump 2.0?
As ABC settles a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald Trump, one it’s thought they would have won should it have chosen to fight it, The News Agents ask if Trump’s re-election will lead to an unrecognisable media landscape.
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In brief:
- With Trump's return to the presidency, media organisations are showing a different approach compared to 2016, including settling lawsuits such as ABC's $15 million defamation case more readily than before.
- There is concern that news outlets seem less willing to challenge Trump, with some potentially prioritising business interests or avoiding legal confrontations over rigorous reporting.
- The media landscape appears to be shifting from a stance of aggressive accountability in 2016 to a more cautious and conciliatory approach towards the president elect.
What’s the story?
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 - much to everyone's surprise, including his own - news organisations in America and beyond saw their role, as it has always been, to hold truth to power.
Now, as the press heads into a second Trump administration the question is this; are journalists, who Trump once called “enemies of the people”, still willing to take on the man and his growing hostility towards them?
Trump’s threats and intimidation to the press are no secret, in his first term he threw journalists who critiqued him out of the White House, sent threat letters to news organisations and repeatedly baselessly labelled news reports as ‘fake news.’
This week, ABC settled a defamation lawsuit brought by the president-elect, even though it’s widely believed the network could have fought it and won.
“In 2016 the media were really determined to hold Trump to account, they now look like they want to settle and make a peace deal with him,” Jon Sopel says on The News Agents USA.
“It feels like the atmosphere has changed in the way that the media is going to deal with Donald Trump.”
Why did ABC settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald Trump?
Donald Trump sued ABC over an inaccurate statement made by one of their high profile presenters, George Stephanopoulos, when he repeatedly accused Trump of rape and said he was found liable for rape during an interview.
They settled with Trump, who said it was sexual assault, not rape, and agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library.
“There was a lot of unease about whether ABC should have agreed to pay that,” Emily says.
“They could have argued and probably won in their favor, that there was no malice, that there was a difference of opinion in terms of how you'd interpret the ruling. But they didn't. They rolled over essentially.”
Media law in the US is very different from in the UK. Whereas in the UK, libel action is brought if a journalist has got something wrong, in the US there is a “presumption in favor of the journalists and journalism because of the First Amendment, because of the right to free speech,” Jon explains.
Unless it can be proven that you have said something you know to be false, and you’ve said it with malice, the courts generally rule in journalists' favour.
“So why did ABC settle with Donald Trump so easily?” Jon asks.
Emily thinks ABC’s decision to settle has “spooked” a lot of smaller media organisations.
Mark Landler, London bureau chief of The New York Times, says a lot of people in the media took it as a “worrying sign.”
“We hope it's not a precedent and not a signal of how other news organisations are going to deal with these kinds of legal threats, which are likely to continue and perhaps even intensify,” he told The News Agents.
“It's clear that Stephanopoulos probably should have been more careful about his language.
“But I think, if we're honest, in our business having complete, perfect accuracy and without any lack of nuance or dispute is difficult to achieve all the time, and so at least in the American legal system, there's always been a legal presumption in favor of journalists being able to to speak relatively freely, unless there's a sort of a reckless disregard for the truth.
“That's where, I think, this seems a bit problematic.”
What’s The News Agents’ take?
Whilst the first amendment ensures the right to free speech, Jon wonders whether the free press “is going to find itself under a bit more pressure this time round.”
ABC isn’t the only media organisation wanting to settle hostilities with Trump.
Jon notes that Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the presenters of Morning Joe on left-leaning MSNBC, want to make friends.
“Morning Joe has been vicious about Donald Trump for the last eight years, they have now been down to Mar-a-Lago to play nicely with Donald Trump.”
Landler notes that journalists began trying to get on-side with Trump before he won the election, with the decision of the Washington Post and the LA Times not to endorse either candidate for president.
“Their editorial boards would have almost certainly endorsed Trump’s opponent and the overlords, the people who own those companies, both decided, in those cases, that they just simply were not willing to run a risk of antagonising Trump even before they knew he was going to win the election.
“We went from a default position that our job is to hold this administration to account, and we're going to use the full force of our constitutional right to do that to ‘well, maybe these aren't fights worth picking’.”
In some cases, it could be that the owners of these media companies have other reasons to avoid a head-to-head with the next president.
“Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and has got a number of other business interests, as well as Amazon, has also got a space business and wants government contracts,” Jon points out.
Elon Musk, who made a large donation to Trump’s campaign and now officially advises Trump, has previously posted on X mulling the possibility of buying MSNBC.
The New York Times is no stranger to lawsuits from Trump. Landler recalls the publication he works for has been sued twice by Trump, but both times they won.
“There are, at the moment, some threat letters against coverage. Our intention, I'm told by our lawyers, is that we will fight all of these cases. We are confident that, based on the past history, that we should prevail.
“If CNN and ABC News and others are not on the playing field in the same way they were in 2016, there's a morale issue for journalism as a whole, and for us to be the exception, I think that's not a good place.”