It’s a real shame when your Comrades in the Credentialed Media have to be careful to no longer lie about Trump and Republicans. The 1st Amendment technically says that Congress can pass no law on freedom of the press. It doesn’t say anything about them not being immune to being sued for libel and slander
Trump settlement with ABC alarms Democrats
Democratic lawmakers are expressing alarm over ABC News’s decision to pay $15 million to President-elect Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation suit, fearing it’s part of a broader trend of the legacy media capitulating to Trump.
Senate Democrats are lamenting the decline of legacy media outlets that used to wield greater influence over the national political debate, and they worry that major news organizations won’t put as much critical scrutiny on Trump’s second term after he won a resounding victory over Vice President Harris in last month’s election.
In other words, they are mad that the news won’t be able to do their Narrative thing at Trump and Republicans while bolstering Democrats. Have they considered that people have caught on to the shenanigans and that’s one of the reasons that the Credentialed Media is dying and is barely trusted?
ABC News’s settlement, along with an apology for anchor George Stephanopoulos’s mischaracterizing two jury verdicts against Trump, is the latest bombshell shaking Democrats’ confidence that media organizations will stand up against Trump.
“I think there have been a number of really dangerous signals sent to Trump by the media that they are not willing to stand up to him,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who is seen by some as a possible presidential candidate for his party in 2028.
Why would they stand up to him? Did they consider simply reporting in an honest and straightforward manner? Heck, Trump is more than willing to sit around for an hour or so quite often and take questions, something Biden was mostly unwilling to do. The entire reason the press was mentioned in the 1st was to hold all government accountable. Freedom of Speech would have covered it, right?
“The ABC settlement is the latest. But the decision of Comcast to sell MSNBC, the decision of The Washington Post and other newspapers not to endorse [in the presidential race], the decision of Elon Musk to just fold his entire operation into the White House” are other examples of that trend, Murphy said.
“This is how democracy dies, is the media elites deciding it would be better to go along with the regime rather than tell the truth. The truth is that lawsuit against ABC didn’t have merit,” he said.
Good word: Elites. That’s how they act, especially when so many of the reporters went to cushy highfalutin universities with the children of Those In Power, including in Congress, and many of the older ones went to college with those in Congress. Their job is to report. That’s it. Not be activists.
Flagship evening newscasts on ABC, CBS and NBC have been “almost uniformly negative” when covering some of President-elect Donald Trump’s most significant Cabinet appointees, according to a new study from the Media Research Center.
The MRC examined all coverage of Trump’s Cabinet appointees on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “CBS Evening News” and NBC’s “Nightly News” from December 1-14. The study primarily focused on Trump’s Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth, FBI Director selection Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, though it also included the other appointments.
Trump’s nominees earned a combined total of 60 minutes and 47 seconds of coverage during the 2-week period. The conservative media watchdog group found that 96% of the coverage was negative.
And that’s how the Credentialed Media dies: being partisan hacks and not even hiding it in their activities. We The People are not stupid, and do not like being treated as being stupid. So, we go elsewhere for news, and there are plenty of other outlets. Look at the Washington Post: they are hemorrhaging readers, and their stupid paywall doesn’t help. But, their actual paper edition is dying because people do not want to pay for hardcore partisan activist articles.
Democracy won’t die, as Senator Murphy things, because partisan outlets aren’t being listened to and are having to be truthful and not libelous/slanderous, as there are more than enough news outlets out there.
Bummed about the floodgates opening are they?
Since previous courts have decreed that libel is worth between 500 million and a billion, seems ABC got off light.