Bending the Knee to Trump Is as Easy as ABC

Perilous moments of political transition like Donald Trump’s return to the White House are when we need our media watchdogs barking the loudest.

We need journalists exposing power grabs, digging into the backgrounds of unqualified and unhinged nominees, and telling the stories of those communities — undocumented immigrants, trans kids, Palestinian activists, pregnant people, etc. — who face real danger from the next president and his minions.

But instead of trusted sentries, U.S. corporate media execs are acting like compliant lapdogs: rolling over, showing their bellies and begging for table scraps.

Let’s review some recent lowlights.

ABC: Another Billionaire Capitulates

Over the weekend, Disney-owned ABC News made the terrible decision to pay $15 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against the network. The former and future president claimed he had been defamed when ABC’s George Stephanopolous described Trump as “liable for rape” when, due to New York legal definitions, a jury technically found him liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll.

(In fact, the judge in the case went out of his way to clarify that, despite these technicalities, the jury found that Trump was liable for rape “as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”)

So why did ABC settle such a clearly winnable case? The obvious answer is that Disney sees selling out its newsrooms as a small price to pay for shielding its larger business interests from Trump’s erratic ire. Company execs will bend the knee and kiss the ring in hopes for more deregulation, mergers and tax cuts.

Incidentally — and by absolute and total coincidence — the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s incoming chief of staff shortly before the settlement was announced. Nothing to see here.

Disney only cares about its bottom line. The societal costs rise dramatically, however, when you start factoring in how this settlement harms the public’s trust in journalism and any hope for accountability for Trump. As journalist Brian Beutler wrote in his newsletter:

“This is a trophy for Trump, one he’ll lord over ABC News and the rest of the legacy media for the rest of his time in public life. How frequently do you think you’ll hear him claim ABC admitted to being ‘fake news’ then paid him ‘millions and millions of dollars’ to avoid an even larger defamation judgment? How often do you think he’ll paint with a broader brush, accusing all news outlets of the same supposed misdeeds? How frequently do you think he’ll claim the ABC decision essentially nullifies the jury decision holding him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll? Now double or triple your guesses.”

Palm Beach pilgrims

ABC isn’t alone in its cowardly kowtowing to Trump. Witness the pilgrimage to Palm Beach of so many media and tech execs who once pretended to care about decency and democracy — and are now desperately seeking Mar-a-Lago photo-ops and waving million-dollar inauguration indulgences to erase their sins of ever doubting the day-one dictator.  

Apple’s Tim Cook made the trip. So did Google’s Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who coughed up $1 million for Trump’s inauguration after suppressing political content during the election season.

In case his decision to yank The Washington Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris wasn’t enough, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos threw in $1 million to Trump’s inauguration — and announced that Prime Video will livestream the event. Democracy may die in darkness, but the government cloud-computing contracts Bezos covets flourish there like mushrooms.

Meanwhile, folks like Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch and the Sinclair broadcasting braintrust must be laughing: They’re already on the inside and picking out cabinet members while their competitors are forced to stoop and bow.

Unfair and unbalanced

Not to be outdone by Silicon Valley, the remaining old-media barons are sidling up to Trump like so many submissive Shih Tzus. Nexstar’s Perry Sook promises to eliminate “activist journalism out there” if Trump’s FCC allows him to buy a few hundred more local-TV stations.

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has declared war on his own staff, spiking opinion pieces critical of Trump and, according to media reporter Oliver Darcy’s newsletter, instituting  “a new policy that prohibits editorials containing criticism of the president-elect unless they are presented side-by-side with another opinion piece representing the 'opposing view.’”

In addition, Soon-Shiong has announced plans to post a “bias meter” on all opinion content, bringing pseudo-science to his increasingly bizarre notions of false balance — which, as with Bezos, boils down to killing critical coverage and saying nice things about Trump.

Lord knows how the “bias meter” allegedly works, but my craven corporate bullshit detector is going off the charts.

The coming retribution

What’s so sad and predictable is that all this genuflecting just encourages Trump and his lackeys to kick the press harder when they’re down. Trump continues to make increasingly deranged legal threats, most recently targeting a veteran Des Moines Register pollster who wrongly forecast a Kamala Harris win in Iowa with a lawsuit claiming “election interference.”

The stakes get higher in January. In 2023, Trump’s pick to run the FBI, Kash Patel, told Trump adviser and podcaster Steve Bannon “we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

Trump’s incoming FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, won’t rule out going after broadcast licenses to punish outlets that critique Trump and wants to censor fact checkers. Trump’s incoming FTC chairman, meanwhile, wants to investigate companies that refuse to advertise on social-media platforms next to hateful and extremist content.

“We want retribution and we’re going to get retribution,” Bannon himself told a gathering of right-wing activists shortly after the ABC News settlement. “They never in a million years thought we’d be back in power and they need to learn what populous nationalist power is on the receiving end. I mean, investigations, trials, and then incarceration — and I’m just talking about the media.”

We must take these threats seriously. And we can’t expect the corporate media to save us.

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