Why ABC settled a case they knew they would win — and why the Lincoln Project didn’t

Donald J. Trump sued ABC because a journalist truthfully described Trump on air as a convicted rapist. The legal definition of rape absolutely does cover what Trump was found guilty of doing to E. Jean Carroll.

Instead of taking the case to court, where legal experts say they would have won easily, ABC agreed to pay a fine of $15 million.

Obviously the corporate logic of Disney (which owns ABC News) is that it’s better to keep favor with Trump by agreeing to pay a relatively minor fine.  That’s about 37,500 Lego Death Star playsets, 150 Trump watches, or less than half of Disney CEO Iger’s annual salary.

While none of the corporate behemoths are that different, it’s hard for me to enjoy Star Wars or even Pixar movies when I think of the power that Disney wields. But it’s the same with Comcast and NBC; Paramount and CBS. (This is why I watch so little TV and prefer instead to support local theater.)

ABC’s capitulation reflects a chilling pattern among corporate-owned media outlets: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Washington Post’s Jeff Bezosand Time magazine’s Mark Benioff have all similarly and prematurely capitulated to Trump. L.A. Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong groveled even lower, killing an editorial criticizing Trump’s clown-car cabinet picks. Soon-Shiong has now officially limited the L.A. Times’ criticism of Trump.

Each of these CEOs acted to subordinate the 1st Amendment- and thereby democracy itself- to the bottom line of their other corporate concerns. For Bezos, it’s Amazon and Blue Origin, a federal NASA contractor. For Soon-Shiong, it’s for-profit healthcare corporation NantWorks, involved with federal vaccine distribution. For Benioff, it’s Salesforce’s lucrative contracts with the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, while Altman’s Open AI is positioned to become a major contractor with the Pentagon.

These corporate tycoons, prematurely capitulating on free speech to protect their unrelated corporate interests, have demonstrated the perils of for-profit legacy media. Doing so, they have all but guaranteed that Trump will attempt to imprison his media critics. They need a reminder of their own, taped to their sub-zero refrigerators, from the BBC’s History Magazine:

Many members of (Germany’s corporate elites) thought Hitler was going to be the useful idiot who was going to play their games… they wanted to ride the Nazi movement like a horse.. They would use the momentum and the political potential of the Nazi party (to advance their corporate interests) but still keep it at bay… Within three or four months, they discovered that they were the horse and that Hitler was the horseman. —Raw Story (On a web browser, I was able to avoid the intrusive text-obliterating popup by clicking “ESC” right after the page loaded.)