Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple slammed ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos for agreeing to pay President-elect Donald Trump over $15 million in a legal settlement, arguing they could have beaten his lawsuit.
Wemple’s latest column for the outlet blasted the network and anchor for capitulating to Trump after he filed a lawsuit against them in response to Stephanopoulos stating on-air earlier this year that Trump was found “liable for rape” in a civil case.
“ABC News will never live down this capitulation. Never,” Wemple wrote in his Monday piece, headlined, “A low, low point for ABC News.”
Trump’s legal team released the settlement agreement between the two parties over the weekend. The document revealed that ABC News and its top anchor had agreed to pay $15 million as a charitable contribution to a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff, as Presidents of the United States of America have established in the past.” Additionally, the network will pay $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees.
Additionally, the agreement also bound the defendants to publish statements of “regret” as an editor’s note at the bottom of a March 10, 2024, online article, about the comments that prompted Trump to file the defamation lawsuit.
The note reads, “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.”
Wemple began by remarking on the sheer weight of the news that Trump had gotten ABC News to pay millions of dollars outside of court, describing it as a “stunner news blast.”
“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,” the writer wrote.
Wemple went on to note how much a victory this settlement is for Trump and his supporters, saying, “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.”
Wemple stated that ABC and its anchor took the blow for “standard-issue intransigence by an American media outlet,” and expressed confusion at what he saw as the network giving into Trump’s demands too easily.
“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),” he wrote.
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He suggested this could have been due to ABC higher-ups calling the shots regarding this lawsuit, writing, “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.”
Towards the end of the piece, Wemple argued that ABC News could have defeated Trump’s case.
“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.”
Wemple concluded the column by stating that ABC News and Stephanopoulos bailed on a “a winnable case from a man with a history of exploiting the civil justice system.”
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