ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump....The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, clearly felt it had a lot to lose by pursuing this case. Last year, Disney floated the idea of selling off ABC, the local TV stations it owns, and other "linear" TV networks. Disney announced that it had decided not to sell late last year, but maybe the company has been assuming that it can sell the assets now because the a new administration is less focused on antitrust issues. Trump, being a Republican, certainly doesn't care about industry consolidation, but he could have prevented a sale out of sheer spite, and he would have. And who knows what else he might have done to Disney and its key players?
Mr. Trump sued ABC and Mr. Stephanopoulos in March, after the anchor asked Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who has spoken publicly about being raped as a teenager, why she had continued to support Mr. Trump after he was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in Manhattan.
In that case, a federal jury found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, but it did not find him liable for rape. Still, the judge who oversaw the proceeding later clarified that because of New York’s narrow legal definition of rape, the jury’s verdict did not mean that Ms. Carroll had “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
Many important media figures are genuflecting before Trump -- the owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times blocked publication of Kamala Harris endorsements, the L.A. Times plans to deploy a "bias meter" on its stories, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski kissed the ring, Mark Zuckerberg publicly accused the Biden administration of censorship while suppressing political posts on his social media sites, then donated a million dollars for the inaugural.... You know all the stories. Trump will continue intimidating these people until there's no opposition media left.
But will he like the new information order he seems to be creating, in which, in the future, he'll stop scoring victories against the media because they'll simply stop trying to hold him accountable for his actions?
Look at the benefit he's derived from forcing ABC to kneel. He seems like the powerful alpha male to his base. He sends a (false) message to his traditionalist supporters that he's not a sex criminal -- while also reminding other supporters that he has his way with women whether they like it or not (an idea I'm sure many of them like, although some won't admit it). What happens when there are no media outlets left for Trump to sue because they're all self-censoring? Who'll be left for him to crush if they're all courtiers and sycophants?
Trump thrives on combat. So while it will be terrible for America if the press is afraid to hold Trump to account, it will also leave Trump without one of his most important foils. The Republican base needs enemies to hate, and Trump might be in the process of depriving the base of one of its favorite enemies.
Twenty years ago, in a somewhat less authoritarian time, George W. Bush's Republican Party achievewd unquestioned dominance of American politics. But under those circumstances, who could be the scapegoat when things went wrong? Who had power, apart from the Republicans? When things went wrong in Iraq, Bush and company couldn't blame Dan Rather or the Dixie Chicks.
I'd obviously prefer to have a strong and genuinely independent press (as well as a Democratic Party that's willing to fight back). But if Trump neutralizes all opposition, it will eventually be clear that bad things going on in America are his fault. That won't matter if democracy has been thoroughly gutted. But if it's salvageable, it might make life harder for him.
No comments:
Post a Comment