When ABC News settled with President-elect Donald Trump regarding a defamation lawsuit filed as a result of a George Stephanopoulos interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), it was widely portrayed as an ominous sign of the media’s intent to capitulate to Trump’s demands.
Stephanopoulos, questioning Mace about supporting Trump, had said repeatedly and incorrectly that Trump had been “found liable for rape,” an inaccurate statement that ABC agreed to apologize for while contributing $15M to a future Trump Presidential Library.
Stephanopoulos was “careless,” as Reason magazine put it, and ABC — rather than continue to fight the charge — paid Trump days before depositions were scheduled.
[NOTE: $15M, while a lot of money, is not a game-changer for a major media operation — consider that Fox News, in 2023, reportedly settled a defamation case brought against it for a sum in the neighborhood of $787M and has maintained and even increased its news footprint in the aftermath.]
So it may not be that ABC’s settlement augurs the scoliosis of the Fourth Estate, a backbone concern that many have alarmingly expressed.
Crucial from @anneapplebaum: ABC News’ surrender to Trump suggests news orgs are vulnerable to pressure on companies that own them. Trump will use the state to threaten them.
“It looks like they’re making concessions in advance,” she tells me. On the pod:https://t.co/km4J8gSGTC
— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) December 16, 2024
It is also critical — in understanding the payment — to remember that ABC is corporate media by definition, a small part of the giant Disney Company’s vast portfolio. With Trump’s second election victory, numerous previously tepid business titans have beaten a path to his Mar-a-Lago door, including Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon), who have also opened their checkbooks — each donating $1 million to his second inaugural celebrations.
Regulatory pushback from the White House can have perilous effects on big business, as these leaders know. Though the company did not explain its reason for settling, Disney, like Meta and Amazon and every other company, clearly hopes to avoid unwanted executive branch scrutiny — especially after having just emerged from its “don’t say gay” battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
$15M for Disney is less than one-quarter of what the company paid its CEO Bob Iger in 2018, the year considered in a report by the Economic Roundtable, which revealed that Iger’s pay ($65.6M) was equal to that of 9,284 Disneyland theme park workers, who were paid about $13.36 an hour.
(The New York Times reports that the Trump “settlement was recommended by Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s general counsel, and approved by Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive. It was not elevated to a company board vote.”)
[NOTE: Judd Legum, in his Popular Information newsletter today, cites this pay differential while examining the prevalence of “wage theft” and how a pay fairness measure adopted in Anaheim “by voters in response to substandard wages at Disneyland” was found to “not apply to Disneyland.”]