The Last Gasp of the Legacy Media

After years of receiving abusive and unfair treatment from the legacy media, it must have been especially satisfying for President Donald Trump when a biased broadcast news network, ABC News, was forced to pay a price for their lies.

This overdue reckoning occurred after President Trump sued the network for defamation. During a combative interview with U.S. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) on March 10, 2024, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos made the false claim ten times that President Trump was “found liable for rape.”  

In fact, a liberal New York jury, in May of 2023, found Trump liable of “sexual abuse,” which is different from “rape” and has “a distinct definition under New York law.” Instead of just taking another hit from the legacy media, the President rightfully filed a lawsuit against ABC News for the erroneous comments of their anchor. In the lawsuit, President Trump claimed that his “reputation was besmirched” by the false charges.

Although Stephanopoulos was initially defiant and said he would not be “cowed out of doing my job because of a threat,” ABC News understood their legal jeopardy and agreed to a $15 million financial settlement that was announced on Saturday.

The settlement will preclude the need for depositions that had been scheduled for next week by U.S. Magistrate Court Judge Lisette Reid. There was a deadline on Christmas Eve for “the defendants to file a motion for summary judgment in order to avoid a trial.” 

The funds will be dedicated toward a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff, as Presidents of the United States of America have established in the past.” In addition, ABC News will pay $1 million for President Trump’s legal fees. The settlement also includes a “statement of regret” from the network as an “editor’s note” at the bottom of an online news article about the interview with Mace.

As noted by Breitbart News Senior Legal Contributor Ken Klukowski, the settlement is “encouraging” because it forces “the legacy media” to be “held accountable for slandering someone they politically oppose.”

ABC News is the left-wing news network that showed utter favoritism in the only televised debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and President Trump. The anchors spent the evening inaccurately “fact checking” President Trump while allowing Harris to make a series of misstatements without corrections.

For President Trump, the lawsuit was not about the money, it was about clearing his good name. For nine years, left wing hacks from the legacy media have been slandering President Trump, calling him every insult imaginable.

Along with their biased coverage, networks have been utilizing other techniques to harm President Trump politically. For example, in the case of CBS News, he is also taking legal action and suing the network for $10 billion in damages.

In his lawsuit, President Trump maintains that CBS employed “deceptive conduct” in editing an interview with Harris on their “60 Minutes” news program. The edited interview showed Harris answering a question with much more clarity than the actual response she gave. Trump believes the edits were done for “the purpose of election interference.”

Possibly, this settlement will be a wakeup call for the dwindling members of legacy media. There already have been major changes announced by The Washington Times and The Los Angeles Times. Both left-wing newspapers have announced plans to provide more balanced coverage in the future.

Fortunately, it is probably too late to save the legacy news media, which is already on life support. In the 2024 election, President Trump basically ignored the legacy news media and prioritized interviews on popular podcasts, with larger audiences. He understood that Americans do not rely on biased news reporting from the legacy media. In contrast, they discover it online from other information sources.

The 2024 election exposed their growing irrelevance. Trump was victorious, despite the incredibly dishonest mainstream news coverage he received. According to the Media Research Center (MRC), the election coverage from the three major broadcast news networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, was the “worst display of imbalanced campaign coverage” in modern American history.

The MRC study discovered that Harris received 78% positive news coverage, compared to just 15% for Trump, creating an astounding 63% imbalance in how the candidates were treated.

This insufferable bias extends to the cable news networks, CNN and MSNBC. Once again, Americans are showing their disgust with these unfair news networks. Compared to viewership prior to the 2024 election, ratings for MSNBC have dropped an astonishing 46%, while ratings for CNN have plummeted 33%.

Not only are the ratings dropping for CNN, but news reports also indicate that the size of its workforce will decline in the coming weeks. The same financial struggles are occurring on MSNBC, where primetime hosts have been asked to take large salary reductions.

With the changing viewership trends and the political rise of President Trump, there is an extremely negative mood among the titans of legacy media. At a recent forum, Lesley Stahl, a long time “60 Minutes” reporter, said that the press was “hobbling” and “fraying.” She claimed that she was “very worried” and “very dark” about “the press.”

Of course, Stahl is another biased news reporter who has treated President Trump very unfairly. In an infamous 2020 “60 Minutes” interview, she refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop because “it can’t be verified.” Finally, 769 days after the story was broken by the New York Post, CBS News “confirmed the authenticity of the laptop.”

Stahl is calling the legacy media, “the press,” but, in this new era, independent journalists are creating new platforms every day online. Stahl is concerned that Americans have decided to finally turn off her biased program and ignore the legacy media.

In a recent Gallup poll, 69% of Americans expressed “not very much confidence” or “no trust” in the media. Thankfully, after enduring years of lies and bias, Americans have rendered their verdict on the legacy media and are saying, “good riddance.”

Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian and his award-winning program, “Ringside Politics,” airs Saturdays from Noon until 1 p.m. CT nationally on Real America’s Voice TV Network & AmericasVoice.News and weekdays from 7-9 a.m. & 6-7 p.m. CT on WGSO 990-AM & Wgso.com. He is a political columnist, the author of America’s Last Chance and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and on Crouere.net. For more information, email him at [email protected].