The Real Danger of ABC News Settling Its Lawsuit With Donald Trump

Over the weekend, ABC News shocked the media establishment by agreeing to pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit that the president-elect filed against the network and its anchor George Stephanopoulos. On Monday, Trump announced that he plans to target another news outlet, this time, a much smaller, local newspaper: the Des Moines Register in Iowa.

Trump said he plans to sue the daily newspaper, with a staff of around 50 journalists, and political pollster Ann Selzer. He attacked the Register and Selzer for publishing a poll several days before the election that showed Vice President Kamala Harris defeating Trump in Iowa by 3 percentage points. Trump would go on to win Iowa by 13 points and has since said the paper published a “fake” poll.

“I’m not doing this because I want to,” Trump said during a Monday press conference, announcing the potential lawsuit. “I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to.”

“When they settle, not only are they putting a target on their back, they’re putting a target on the backs of smaller outlets.”

Legal attacks, such as defamation suits, are nothing new for news organizations. Lawsuits by the rich and powerful, however, are not as common as one might think — and that’s because they often don’t work.

Thanks to precedents that largely favor journalists in cases against the powerful, many outlets defend their coverage, fighting the case in court, even at the cost of the organization’s finances. With ABC News bowing out of its own legal fight against Trump, however, media and legal experts worry Trump and other powerful individuals are now emboldened to retaliate against smaller, more vulnerable news outlets for critical coverage. 

“When they settle, not only are they putting a target on their back, they’re putting a target on the backs of smaller outlets that don’t have those kinds of legal resources,” said Seth Stern, an attorney and director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation. “ABC will write a $15 million check tomorrow and can write another one in six months and they’ll be alright. Others don’t have that luxury. So it’s unfortunate that the message was sent that the media can be bullied.”

Unlike ABC, smaller publications and individual journalists are not always equipped with an in-house legal team. Even if allegations are eventually dismissed or if publications prevail in court, legal fees can prove costly. An operation like Disney-owned ABC News has more financial flexibility to fight such cases. Despite dips in advertising revenue going to TV news networks in recent years, ABC News still raked in nearly $150 million in ad revenue in 2022, according to the Pew Research Center. And legal experts also felt ABC News had a winnable case. 

Trump’s main contention in the lawsuit, filed in March, was over Stephanopoulos mentioning on air that Trump had been found “liable for” raping writer E. Jean Carroll. A lawsuit instead found Trump civilly liable for sexual assault. Thanks to the First Amendment and other protections for  news organizations, ABC had a strong defense. 

Stern himself defended a newspaper in Chicago against a similar accusation. In 2014, a Northwestern University professor accused of sexually assaulting a student took exception to a newspaper headline that described the allegations as “rape” and sued the paper. A judge threw out the lawsuit, ruling that the words “rape” and “sexual assault” are interchangeable, according to the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.  

Because the ABC case had many protections on its side, the decision to settle left room for speculation that the broadcaster and Disney were not owning up to a journalistic mistake, but may have instead wanted to get on “Trump’s good side ahead of Trump’s presidency,” said Adam Winkler, a professor in constitutional law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. 

“This shows that some media outlets are willing to settle defamation cases if they think it’s better for their bottom line,” Winkler said. 

Companies would usually fight such cases to protect their credibility and ability to report in the future, Winkler said. The ABC settlement incentivized others to make similar legal attacks.

He said, “Traditionally these companies don’t want to settle these kinds of cases precisely for fear of encouraging other people to sue them.”

Trump’s List of Lawsuits

Trump has been notoriously freewheeling with his suits against journalists and media companies of all stripes. In October, Trump filed a false advertising lawsuit against CBS News alleging that the network doctored a “60 Minutes” segment to make Harris appear more favorable in her comments. The suit, filed in Texas, seeks $10 billion in damages. 

In another lawsuit filed in 2022, Trump accused the Pulitzer Board of defamation for defending its decisions to award the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The case is ongoing.

During his previous term, Trump has also shown a willingness to attack journalists in other ways, including using the Department of Justice to surveil reporters. 

“These papers and news outlets are easy marks these days because everyone knows they’re struggling.”

For media advocates like Stern, the concern of similar defamation lawsuits being filed are much larger than Trump. Even before the ABC settlement, he noted an increase in defamation suits that are intended to silence critics. He pointed to an increasingly hostile environment toward media outlets in which more swaths of the public wouldn’t push back on a wealthy individual suing an outlet. And then there’s the overall suffering economics of the news industry. 

He’s hopeful a new bipartisan bill recently introduced in Congress can protect against some of the fallout, specifically for news publications and journalists. 

“These papers and news outlets are easy marks these days because everyone knows they’re struggling,” Stern said. “The news industry, local news in particular, is in a pretty grim state financially. Millionaires years ago might have said, ‘Well, I’ve got millions, but so does the newspaper, I don’t really want to go to work with that.’” 

“Now,” Stern said, “it’s a bit different — they’re making a different calculation. They’re saying, ‘I’ve got far more money to throw around then this struggling news outlet does, so let me take a swing at them and see what happens.’”

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