Furious that ABC News had fact-checked him during his lone presidential debate with Kamala Harris on Sept. 10, Donald Trump lobbed a threat at the network the next morning. “I think ABC took a big hit last night,” Trump said during an appearance on “Fox and Friends.” “I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They oughta take away their license for the way they did that.”
Apparently, the network took the threat seriously. On Saturday, in a move that is extremely rare for a major news organization, ABC settled a libel case Trump had filed in March. The network, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, agreed to pay $15 million and express regret because its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, had used the wrong word to describe the sexual abuse a New York jury found Trump had inflicted on writer E. Jean Carroll.
There’s nothing new about Trump threatening, suing, or seeking retribution against the press, which he calls “the enemy of the people.” But the context is new. He is the president-elect and has power to punish the news media for coverage he deems hostile. Some journalists criticized ABC for buckling under.
In an era of declining trust in the news media, adverse libel judgments from juries have become more common. While newspapers once rarely settled defamation suits and the bar for proving libel is extremely high, Trump has urged that the libel laws be “opened up.” Several conservative Supreme Court justices have indicated a willingness to revisit Times v. Sullivan, the landmark decision that requires that false information about public figures be knowingly published in order to prove libel.
Inside leading news organizations, editors, reporters, and lawyers are discussing how to protect journalism. Reporters have been reminded that their notes can be seized in certain instances and their calls monitored. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued new guidelines that make it harder to force journalists to disclose their sources, but lawyers expect these guidelines to be rescinded by the Trump Justice Department.
Last month, Trump ordered Republicans to kill a bipartisan bill that would strengthen the ability of reporters to protect confidential sources. On his Truth Social platform, he issued this edict: “Republicans Must Kill This Bill.” And dead it appears to be.
Some journalists with whom I regularly communicate have begun using encrypted apps like Signal, which can erase all messages, for their professional conversations, and others are being more careful about what they write in emails or on internal company Slack channels.
The most vulnerable reporters are those who cover national security, where recent past presidents, including Trump and Barack Obama, launched protracted investigations to find out who inside the government revealed classified national security secrets to reporters. I was involved in several of these investigations as managing editor and executive editor of The New York Times. They cause a great deal of nervousness for the reporters involved and rarely end up identifying the leakers.
While reporters worry about protecting their sources, their corporate bosses fret that Trump can cancel their broadcast licenses. It’s unclear if he could unilaterally do this because the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the broadcast system, is technically an independent agency. But Trump wants to bring it, and other agencies, under his control. Besides his threat to ABC, he has also vowed to yank CBS’s license.
Several days before the election he also sued CBS for the absurd sum of $10 billion, alleging that it doctored Harris’s interview on “60 Minutes” to make her sound more concise. He filed the suit in federal court in Amarillo, Texas, where an extremely conservative judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, presides.
Until the ABC settlement, it was unclear that Trump was serious about having an all-out war against the press, in part because he so craves its attention. Going back to the 1980s, his exploits were often on the front pages of the New York tabloids. Though he lambasts The New York Times as “fake news” and has sued the newspaper multiple times (the cases have all been thrown out), he yearns for the respect of his hometown paper and talks to some of its reporters.
But right after the election, according to Columbia Journalism Review, he sent a letter threatening a $10 billion defamation suit against the Times but has not filed it, according to a Times lawyer. The judge in one of the other cases ordered Trump to pay the Times’ hefty $392,000 legal fees, which he promptly did.
Meanwhile, his administration is being filled with fellow press bashers, like Kash Patel, who Trump wants as head of the FBI, and Kari Lake, his choice to head Voice of America, who has called reporters “monsters.”
Trump will likely interpret ABC’s acquiescence and the libel settlement as evidence that the press will be cowed into giving him kinder, gentler coverage. Delighted to be named Time’s Person of the Year last week for the second time, he said, as others have noted, “the media’s tamed down a little bit; they’re liking us much better now, I think,” adding, with a smile: “If they don’t, we’ll have to just take them on again and we don’t want to do that.”
Jill Abramson was a senior lecturer in the Harvard English Department from 2014 to 2023 and was executive editor of The New York Times from 2011 to 2014. She currently teaches at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. She is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.