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The incoming chairman of the FCC has fired off a letter to Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger referencing ABC‘s recent settlement of a defamation lawsuit filed by Donald Trump, while also decrying the overall decline in public trust in the media, according to CNN.
But the letter got into other issues, including retransmission consent and affiliate negotiations and its impact on localism, CNN’s Brian Stelter reported.
ABC recently agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential foundation and library and $1 million in legal fees to settle a libel lawsuit over comments that George Stephanopoulos made on This Week in March.
A spokesperson for Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Carr has previously pointed to polls showing Americans have a low trust in media, suggesting that the FCC could have a role in the issue. But the agency is limited by the First Amendment when it comes to monitoring or sanctioning stations over news content, even though Trump has suggested that ABC and other networks should lose their licenses over broadcasts he doesn’t like. The FCC licenses stations, not networks.
Per CNN, Carr wrote in the letter to Iger that “ABC’s own conduct has certainly contributed to this erosion in public trust. For instance, ABC News recently agreed to pay $15 million to President Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum and an additional $1 million in attorney fees to settle a defamation case.”
Carr, though, then pointed to the higher levels of trust for local media outlets, while suggesting that ABC was taking a heavy handed approach in negotiations with its affiliates. There has been widespread speculation that Carr would seek to relax media ownership rules, as previous GOP FCC chairs have done, but he has been outspoken about the public interest obligations of broadcasters.
Carr said in a recent CNBC interview, “You’ve got the national networks, for instance ABC, NBC, CBS. They provide a lot of the content that the actual licensed local broadcasts disseminate. And so we need to look at empowering those local broadcasters to serve their local communities, even if that’s in conflict with the interests of those national networks. I mean, at the end of the day, you’ve got all this content from Hollywood and New York that’s being distributed down through these local broadcasters. Let’s make sure they feel empowered to do the right thing by their local community.”
Trump sued ABC after Stephanopoulos said that a jury had found the former president liable for rape. In fact, the jury in writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial had found Trump liable to sexual assault. The judge in the case, however, later said that the jury’s verdict amounted to a finding of rape in common meaning. The judge wrote, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’ Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Some First Amendment advocates warned that the settlement would lead to other Trump lawsuits and attacks on the media. Indeed, Just days after the settlement, Trump sued pollster Ann Seltzer and The Des Moines Register for publishing an outlier poll, just days before the election, that showed Kamala Harris ahead by three points. In fact, Trump handily won the state.
The fear among advocates and in the media is that the litigation will force outlets to spend on legal resources at a time when so many legacy publications are grappling with declining revenues.
Carr has also attacked a media watchdog, NewsGuard, claiming that it was somehow in a “censorship cartel” with major tech companies. NewsGuard provides clients with ratings of the reliability of news sites, but has rejected accusations that it has a political bias, noting that it has rated some conservative outlets higher than liberal ones. One outlet on the right, though, got a low 20/100 score: Newsmax. Aong other things, NewsGuard cited articles that made false claims about the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as well as one that advanced the false claim that the Covid vaccine could change a person’s DNA.
