ABC Slammed by Media Colleagues

Not for actually lying, of course, but rather for copping to the lie

This Week host George Stephanopoulos rape-shames House Rep Nance Mace

On Monday ABC News, along with news host and Democrat partisan George Stephanopoulos, settled a defamation lawsuit filed against them by Donald Trump for a total of $16 million dollars and an apology, in regards to false claims made on air by Stephanopoulos about Trump. Media condemnations of ABC were swift, but not for the offense they have copped to, as a normal person might expect, but instead for the much graver offense of having admitted it.

Eric Deggans at NPR chracterized it as ABC “bending the knee”.

CNN’s Brian Stelter worried that it would “embolden” Trump.

Ex-Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi called it “an awful settlement and a huge sellout.”

Sharon Waxman, editor of The Wrap described it as “caving to Trump” and “disheartening”.

Chris Cillizza called it “an incredibly dangerous precedent” while his guest and NBC entertainer Chuck Todd said it was “a gut punch to anybody that works at a major media company”.

Washington Post writer Erik Wemple called it a “capitulation” that “ABC will never live down.”

The underlying assumption of most of this criticism, stated explicitly by Cillizza and Todd, is that there was almost no chance that ABC would have lost had they allowed the suit to go to court, which itself produced speculation as to why they “capitulated”. Both Todd and Stelter speculated that they were trying to avoid bad PR, perhaps some unwelcome email revelations that might come out of any pretrial discovery and depositions. Whether the assumption that ABC was likely to win in court is a sound one or not, what was notably missing from all of this hand wringing was any acknowledgement that ABC and Stephanopoulos had in fact lied about Trump. And in that absence these so-called journalists reveal their own corruption. Their main concern seems not to be honesty and accuracy, but is instead that such lies might become more difficult to advance and defend in the future.

The suit against ABC arose out of an interview that Stephanopoulos did with Nancy Mace, a Republican House representative from South Carolina. In an attempt to shame Mace for being a Trump supporting rape victim - which, despite his feeble protestations, was undeniably what he was trying to do - Stephanopoulos began the interview by showing a clip of Mace talking about herself being a rape victim, and then asking her:

You endorsed Donald Trump for president. Judges in two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming a victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw?

As politicians are wont to do, Mace evaded a direct answer, but Stephanopoulos was having none of it, and for quite literally for the full 10 minute interview, he harangued her on the point. At no time did he ever move on to another topic, as he just kept repeating the same question in different ways. Throughout the questioning, the one constant was the phrase “liable for rape”. He didn’t just say it once. He repeated the claim that Trump had been found “liable for rape” 10 separate times over the course of the entire interview. He said it for the first time a mere 50 seconds into the interview, and repeated it for the last time 8 seconds before ending the interview. It was ubiquitous throughout, like a mantra that he was attempting to drill into viewers heads, repeating it over and over again at every possible opportunity.

Clearly it was very, very important to Stephanopoulos that his audience know that Trump was “found liable for rape”. There is just one problem. It was completely untrue.

In E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump, which accused him of raping her, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse, not rape. At first glance that may seem a mere semantic nitpick, but in fact under the law applicable to the suit, it was not. Indeed, holding Trump liable for rape was a choice presented to the jury, and it quite consciously and explicitly declined to do so. As the verdict form filled out by the jury, shown below, clearly demonstrates, when asked “Did Ms. Carroll prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Caroll?”, the jury checked the “No” line.

So Stephanopolous’s claim about Trump was, quite simply and undeniably, false. And, again, it wasn’t a one time slip up, after which a correction was made. He repeated the claim over and over and over again, and never issued a correction at any point all the way up until the settlement forced him to do so.

Was Stephanopoulos deliberately lying? Obviously we can’t know his state of mind at the very moment of the interview, but we do know that Stephanopoulos was aware that Trump had not in fact been found liable for rape. How do we know? Because in an interview with E. Jean Carroll on Good Morning America the day after the verdict came out, Stephanopoulos himself specifically asked Carroll about her feelings when the first verdict was read and “it was that he was not found liable for rape”.

So either Stephanopoulos was deliberately lying, or he had somehow “forgotten” one of the few things about the case that he had previously found notable enough to include in a brief 3 minute interview with Carroll. Notably, Stephanopoulos has never claimed to have forgotten.

ABC at first sought to have the suit dismissed on the grounds that what Stephanopoulos had claimed was “substantially true”, arguing that even the judge who oversaw the Carroll trial had hand-waved away the legal distinction between rape and sexual assault when talking about how laymen would see the verdict in one of his post-trial rulings. And in that questionable ruling the judge had indeed done exactly that. But apparently a judge’s view of how a layman might (mis-) understand the law and a jury’s verdict is no excuse for a news organization to falsely portray that verdict to its audience, and so ABC’s motion to dismiss was denied. Only when it became clear that ABC would indeed have to face a jury of its peers did ABC “capitulate”.

But virtually none of ABC’s critics were critical of the falsehood itself, nor of Stephanopoulos’s dishonesty/poor memory. Indeed, almost none of them bothered to even mention the fact of the falsehood at all, nor of the bewildering decision to unnecessarily oversell sexual abuse as a rape. Is sexual abuse not bad enough? Did the message that Stephanopoulos was trying to convey to his audience really hinge on whether Trump was found to be liable of rape rather than sexual abuse? Would Stephanopoulos’s attempt to rape-shame Mace for her political support of Trump have been that much less effective had he relied on a true sexual abuse verdict rather than a false rape verdict? Why exactly did he feel compelled to inflate the verdict?

But not a single one of his critics takes him or ABC to the woodshed on that count. They are all far more concerned about the potential effect of ABC owning up to, and paying for, its falsehoods than they are with the act of conveying falsehoods itself. In his WaPo column Wemple not only condemns ABC for lacking the courage to go to the mat over what in other contexts they would call “disinformation”, but even claims it had an obligation to do so, rather than “bailing on a winnable case”.

And that, apparently, is all that really matters to these people, that the case was “winnable”. They care only about whether or not the media can tell lies with impunity, not whether or not it should do so. Just like corrupt policemen framing someone that they “know” to be guilty of, well, something, they hold in contempt any brethren who breaks the blue wall of silence. The real critique of ABC boils down simply to this: You could have gotten away with the crime, if only you had shown some balls.

The “incredibly dangerous precendent” set by the ABC settlement was made explicit by Chris Cillizza: It “undermines journalists doing their jobs." This is quite instructive, that journalists consider conveying objectively false information as true in pursuit of advancing preferred narratives to be simply “doing their jobs”. They are charlatans.

American’s trust in the legacy media is already at record lows, but as this episode confirms, no matter how little you trust American media, it isn’t little enough.