How some news outlets are 'capitulating preemptively' as Trump escalates his war on the press
03 January
Donald Trump gestures at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr/File Photo
We speak with The Nation's Chris Lehmann about President-elect Donald Trump's escalating attacks on the press and how major media figures and institutions are “capitulating preemptively” to the pressure. ABC News recently settled a defamation suit brought by Trump by making a $15 million donation to his future presidential library, despite experts saying the case was easily winnable. Trump is also suing The Des Moines Register for publishing a poll before the election that showed him losing to Vice President Kamala Harris. “What’s happening is a very clear pattern in Trump’s public life,” says Lehmann. “This is a show of power.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We end today’s show looking at Donald Trump’s renewed war on the press, which he’s often called “the enemy of the people.” Trump recently sued The Des Moines Register, its parent company Gannett and the pollster Ann Selzer for publishing a poll before the election that showed him trailing Kamala Harris in Iowa. While Trump ended up easily winning Iowa, he’s now accusing the paper of committing, quote, “brazen election interference,” unquote. Trump laid out his plans to target The Des Moines Register and other news outlets during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago.
PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: And I feel I have to do this. I shouldn’t really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else. But I have to do it. It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press. Our press is very corrupt, almost as corrupt as our elections.
AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s lawsuit against The Des Moines Register came just days after ABC News, which is owned by Disney, settled a defamation lawsuit filed by the president-elect. The network agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library and pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s lawyer. Trump sued ABC after its anchor George Stephanopoulos said Trump was found “liable for rape” in a 2023 civil case in Manhattan brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. ABC has been widely criticized for agreeing to settle instead of going to court to fight what many believed to be a winnable case. The prominent attorney Marc Elias responded to the settlement by writing, “Knee bent. Ring kissed. Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience,” unquote.
Juan González and I recently spoke to Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation, who wrote an article headlined “Trump’s Attack on the Free Press Is Just Getting Started.” I started out by asking Chris to lay out what’s happening.
CHRIS LEHMANN: Well, what’s happening is a very clear pattern in Trump’s public life. It actually well antedates his rise to political power. He made a practice of frequently going after journalists for defamation. He famously sued one of his biographers, who wrote in this biography that Trump did not qualify as a billionaire. And in his subsequent deposition, Trump basically said he was a billionaire because he felt like a billionaire. This is a long-standing pattern of just intimidation of the press. And Trump was very open as a private businessperson that that was his aim. He wanted to exert a chilling effect on people doing critical reporting from him.
Now, of course, he has the awesome power of the federal government behind him, or prospectively behind him, and ABC disgracefully capitulated right away. And The Des Moines Register suit is a clear augur of what’s lying ahead. At the Mar-a-Lago conference you mentioned, Trump also threatened to sue Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize — Pulitzer Peace Prize committee for these, you know, alleged offenses against, basically, Trump’s bottomless vanity. So, by capitulating, you know, sort of preemptively the way ABC has, this news organization has set the stage for a torrent of similar suits like this. You know, Trump will, and his henchmen, like Kash Patel — also, Pete Hegseth has threatened a defamation suit against the person alleging sexual assault against him. You know, this will be a prime MO of the second Trump administration. And it’s very worrisome that even before Trump takes office, ABC is, without cause, giving in. It sends a very distressing signal.
In point of fact, what George Stephanopoulos said on the air was just a paraphrase of what the judge in Trump’s — in the E. Jean Carroll case said. He said that even though Trump’s conduct on the case did not rise to the strict definition of rape under New York law, any commonsense understanding of rape suggests that Trump did, in fact, commit that act. So —
AMY GOODMAN: The judge said that.
CHRIS LEHMANN: The judge in the case. So, there is not — this was not George Stephanopoulos just randomly popping off on the air. It was a documented claim.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Chris, I wanted to ask you — in The Des Moines Register lawsuit, Trump is alleging consumer fraud by The Des Moines Register as a weapon? Could you talk about that, particularly, and also the impact on these media companies, many of which tend to want to settle just to get rid of a lawsuit?
CHRIS LEHMANN: Right, right. Yeah, the fraud charge is — you know, as far as I know, has no legal basis. You can’t just say, because a pollster got something wrong, there is some deliberate intent to mislead. It’s a plainly frivolous suit. But that is the point. This is a show of power on the part of an administration that, we know from his prior turn in office, takes every opportunity to demonize, harass and intimidate the free press. So, you know, this, The Des Moines Register suit, is very much like the Trump biography suit I mentioned earlier. It’s just his vanity was affronted by poll findings that, you know, turned out to be wrong. You know, I don’t know what he can assert the damage has been, if he won Iowa by 15 points after this poll was released. It is just a plain effort to harass and intimidate.
To its credit, the _Register_’s parent company, unlike Disney, which owns ABC, indicates it will be putting up a robust defense. And, you know, in a sane court system, they will prevail. But, you know, all of this takes resources and money. And as you mentioned, Juan, you know, big companies don’t want to be bothered with the hassle of going to court, even though these companies also have libel insurance precisely for cases like this, and they don’t actually tend to suffer in terms of the bottom line.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this is extremely serious, when you look at the amount that ABC settled for. They were —
CHRIS LEHMANN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — just about to go to depositions — right? — of George Stephanopoulos —
CHRIS LEHMANN: Right, to discovery, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — and Trump, to discovery.
CHRIS LEHMANN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, ABC called that off. Fifteen million dollars plus another million for lawyers’ fees, any smaller news organization couldn’t possibly deal with something like this. And then —
CHRIS LEHMANN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you have these news divisions that are not, you know, profitable. They only profit democracy, but —
CHRIS LEHMANN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — so-called, you know, financially profitable. From these multinational or these very large corporations that own lots of other things, like Bezos with The Washington Post —
CHRIS LEHMANN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: — and they care more about that other stuff, they don’t want to be seen unfavorably by Trump, so they settle on the news issue. This is so extremely disturbing.
CHRIS LEHMANN: Yeah, and this is what happens when you have large corporations who are not — they don’t have journalistic values. They don’t have journalistic priorities. You know, as you said, the news operations are loss leaders for these figures, and Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars in government contracts. The publisher of the L.A. Times, it’s the same story. He has extensive pharmaceutical holdings that come under federal regulation, so he, too, is preemptively knuckling under to the Trump administration. He’s killed editorials critical of Trump. He’s installed this absurd new feature for readers of the paper to track bias. And he’s insisted that anything critical of Trump run alongside, in the op-ed section, something that’s the opposite point of view. This is more than just callow bothsidesism. This is just craven corporate misconduct. And it is —
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Patrick Soon-Shiong who owns the Los Angeles Times.
CHRIS LEHMANN: Yes. Thank you. Yes. So, yeah, this is what happens —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Chris, I wanted to —
CHRIS LEHMANN: Oh, go ahead.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Chris, I wanted to ask you — we only have about a minute left. I wanted to ask you about the potential — what Trump could do with the FCC, especially in terms of broadcasters. Are there any concerns in that area?
CHRIS LEHMANN: Oh, absolutely. Cameron Barr, his nominee to head the FCC, is a very vocal critic of, you know, what in MAGA-land is considered mainstream media censorship. He has gone on and on about how Big Tech, in particular, you know, during COVID and at other times, have allegedly suppressed MAGA causes and talking points. So, yeah, there’s a very real and immediate danger. You know, the call will be coming from inside the White House soon, when Trump’s FCC starts implementing policy.
And it is all of a piece. It’s really important to underline that. You know, what we’re going to see, I think, is what happened in Hungary under Orbán’s rise to power. Trump and JD Vance are both ardent admirers of Viktor Orbán. And Orbán basically used his version of Elon Musk to buy out the national press and turn it into a party propaganda arm.
And, you know, that is a very real and present danger with Trump coming back into power and feeling this kind of impunity and this drive to avenge the people he sees as his enemies. It’s crucial that the press hold the line and follow the example of The Des Moines Register and not the example of ABC News.
AMY GOODMAN: Chris Lehmann, D.C. bureau chief for The Nation. We’ll link to his piece, “Trump’s Attack on the Free Press Is Just Getting Started.”