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.
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.
“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.
Trump has argued he has been victimized by unfair and biased reporting, and many of his allies have said the press unfairly tilted against him during his administration in a bid for ratings and clicks.
If the media is shifting in a different direction this time, they argue it is a good balance against what took place during Trump’s previous presidency.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to National Public Radio in July asking it to turn over documents and information related to its funding sources, claiming it had a “preexisting political bias.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) on Wednesday, asked if his Democratic colleagues are overreacting, offered a one-word response: "Yes."
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he wasn’t intimately familiar with the legal details of ABC’s settlement but observed “from a gut point of view it looks like they have caved in order to suck up to the incoming administration.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) says she was “appalled” by ABC’s settlement.
“If the press caves in rather than fighting to protect their independence, then an important pillar of our democracy will be lost,” she warned.
Warren argued that a strong democracy depends on an independent press, and she said media executives such as Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Disney CEO Bob Iger “need to find the strength to stand up” to political pressure.
“If a tangle of business interests and press ownership undercut that independence, then they should be separated,” she said.
She said “ABC News just caved instead of defending its own independence.”
Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said “Donald Trump's mode of operating is to file lawsuits all over the place as a way of intimidating people and trying to get them to back down.”
She said the media “need to do their job.”
Trump sued ABC News after Stephanopoulos wrongly claimed that Trump had been “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape” during a March 10 interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.).
The presiding judge in the New York trial in which writer E. Jean Carroll accused Trump of abusing her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room wrote that Carroll failed to prove that she was raped within the narrow scope of the New York penal law.
Critics of ABC News’s settlement believe the news organization could have argued that Stephanopoulos’s characterization was “substantially true” or did not meet the high legal bar of acting with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth.
Former U.S. Attorney and MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance wrote that many experts viewed Trump’s “lawsuit as questionable when it was filed and a settlement, especially one this early in the proceedings and of this magnitude, unlikely.”
Vance also flagged the size of ABC News’s settlement, which is three times the amount that Carroll was awarded in the first jury verdict against Trump.
“That suggests something else is going on here, and it’s deeply concerning if that something is that ABC, a major news organization, has decided to curry favor with the incoming president instead of sticking to its guns,” she wrote.
Kennedy, the GOP senator, said Stephanopoulos should have known the difference between being found liable for sexual abuse and rape.
He said Stephanopoulos seemed to deliberately hammer the word “rape” during his contentious interview with Mace.
“I’ve read the reports and I think Mr. Stephanopoulos was wrong, I think he knew it wasn’t right, I think he knew it was a lesser charge,” Kennedy said. “I think he went out of his way to say it, and say it, and say it ... so I don’t have any sympathy for him.
“It was not rape,” he added. “George Stephanopoulos is a very smart man and he knew it wasn’t rape.”
Murphy and other Democratic lawmakers say Trump’s control of the Department of Justice and the FBI give him powerful tools to intimidate political opponents and critics, including members of the press.
“When you control the FBI, the judiciary and many judges, it’s not just intimidation, it’s the threat of jail and bankruptcy,” said Murphy.
The Connecticut senator noted that Trump filed a lawsuit against a journalist who Trump claimed misstated his net worth.
“Trump was very clear he did that only to harass and intimidate that individual, not because he thought he could win the suit,” Murphy said. “When he’s president, he’ll win a lot of these cases. He’ll put people in jail regardless of the merits.
“Kash Patel has told you that he intends to use the FBI to persecute people who hold fair elections,” he added, referring to Trump’s nominee to serve as FBI director.
“I think the events of the last three or four days should cause everybody’s hair to stand up,” he said.
Patel told former Trump ally Steve Bannon in a 2023 podcast interview that if in power “we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
“Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” he said.
Several other Democrats said they are alarmed by Trump’s threats against the media, including the lawsuit he filed against The Des Moines Register for publishing a poll before Election Day showing Harris leading him in Iowa, a state that Trump eventually won by 13 points.
“There appears to be a pattern of trying to suppress any criticism the media might have of Donald Trump and his administration. I think that’s apparent in his lawsuit against The Des Moines Register,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.).
“It’s clearly [what's in] his mind when he nominates Kash Patel to head the FBI, who says they’re going to go after anyone who criticizes Donald Trump,” she said.
