$15 Million Settlement Caps Another Bad Election Year For ABC

If CBS had a “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Election Year,” ABC’s was even worse. In addition to a plethora of other catastrophes, ABC revealed on Saturday that it would pay President-elect Donald Trump a $15 million settlement to resolve a defamation lawsuit.

In March, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos called Trump a rapist, ultimately forcing the network to cut a check to Trump’s presidential library fund. Stephanopoulos made the claim during an interview with Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina. In the interview, the former Clinton White House communications director repeatedly and falsely said Trump was “found liable for rape.”

Trump, however, had been found liable for “sexual abuse,” not rape, by a New York kangaroo court in a case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. Despite not remembering key details of the incident, Carroll said the billionaire real estate mogul sexually assaulted her in a high-end Manhattan department store roughly 30 years ago, when she was about 50 years old.

As part of the settlement disclosed last weekend, ABC was forced to add an editor’s note to the bottom of an article headlined “Nancy Mace defends her support for Trump after he was found liable for sexual assault.”

“ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024,” the note read.

ABC was still rewarded with the one and only presidential debate this election, even after the network characterized anyone who mentioned Biden’s racial and gender criteria for his vice presidential pick as racist.

“Kamala Harris faces racial ‘DEI’ attacks amid campaign for the 2024 presidency,” a July headline read in the aftermath of Biden dropping his reelection bid. “Critics claimed she was a ‘DEI hire’ or backed because of her race.”

But it wasn’t Harris’ opponents who said she was picked for the no. 2 job because of her race and sex. That was the president himself, who said four years ago that his running mate had to be both black and female.

In July, the hostile moderator who opened Trump’s controversial questioning at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago was also with ABC News. The network’s Rachel Scott welcomed Trump by slamming him for criticizing black politicians and reporters and mocking their questions as “stupid and racist.”

“Now that you are asking black supporters to vote for you, why should black voters trust you after you have used language like that?” she asked.

Yet in September, network anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis were co-hosting the debate between Trump and Biden’s replacement. Of the four controversial live fact-checks issued during the prime-time debate, not one of them was made against Harris, who, as the sitting vice president, was allowed to claim that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any warzone around the world [for] the first time this century.”

Here are 24 other lies she told during the ABC forum, but apparently the moderators thought only Trump was worth their attention on air. What was ostensibly a ritual election-year event fundamental to democracy once again turned into a televised show trial, with three teaming up against one. While voters were eager to hear about inflation, crime, and immigration, the ABC moderators were eager to press Trump about the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, even as Harris continued to support bailing out Minneapolis rioters from the year before.

“Is there anything you regret about what you did on [Jan. 6]?” Muir said.

“It’s a very simple question as we move forward toward another election,” Muir added to justify his query, which Americans had already heard answered many times over. After all, Trump faced the same question in nearly every interview since he left the White House.

ABC News wouldn’t say if the network would disclose the debate as an in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign.

The reality is that as long as legacy outlets are allowed to moderate every single showdown, presidential debates will simply be an opportunity for partisan networks to punish Republican candidates instead of platform for a good-faith discussion on the merits of each candidate’s plans for the country. ABC should never have even been on the schedule this year as a host network after Stephanopoulos used his 2020 election town hall to cover for Biden at the same time the former vice president faced serious corruption charges related to his son’s overseas business ventures.

Presidential debates are colossal gifts to networks and the anchors who run them. For that reason, the Trump campaign should have sought to prevent ABC from hosting the prime-time forum in September, especially after the network slandered the Republican nominee as a rapist.

Tristan Justice is a national correspondent for The Federalist and the co-author of “Fat and Unhappy: How ‘Body Positivity’ Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself).” He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected]. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here. Buy “Fat and Unhappy” here.