ABC News capitulates to Donald Trump. Is this the future of American media?

ABC News capitulates to Donald Trump. Is this the future of American media?
If past is prologue, a second Trump administration could crush the First Amendment

By Lucian K. Truscott IV
Columnist
Published December 17, 2024 11:58AM (EST)


(Salon) 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.

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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.

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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.

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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. .......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/12/17/abc-news-capitulates-to-donald-trump-is-this-the-future-of-american-media/