Media Giants Settling With Donald Trump Are Setting a “Dangerous” Precedent

President Donald Trump appears on the verge of hitting a legal trifecta. In December, Disney paid $15 million toward a future presidential library to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against its subsidiary ABC News. In late January, Facebook-parent Meta settled the president’s claims with a $22 million check for the library (plus another $3 million in legal fees). Next up: Paramount Global, owner of CBS News, which is currently negotiating the potential price of its surrender with Trump’s lawyers.

The three cases have appalled legal scholars, journalists, and First Amendment advocates because the settlements appear to be motivated less by the strength of Trump’s arguments than by the fear of much worse to come. The concern is that Trump is using the power of the presidency, and the threat of extracting even greater pain, to strongarm his targets. “No president has ever been as overt about his goal of using as many levers of punishment as possible” to intimidate news organizations and their parent companies, said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor. The corporate capitulation, she told me, is “shortsighted and dangerous.”

Ever since he began to attract media attention in the 1980s, Trump has sued or threatened to sue news organizations. Until late last year, however, he had little to show for it. Trump has never won a defamation suit outright; the Constitution and state libel laws generally protect the press, setting a high bar for celebrities and public figures to prove harm in court. But Trump doesn’t have to go to trial to bring would-be adversaries to his terms. It’s no coincidence that Disney and Meta have settled since Election Day, and Paramount has come to the table. As president, Trump’s leverage has increased exponentially.

Trump sued ABC News last March, claiming anchor George Stephanopolous had defamed him during a TV interview by saying Trump had been found liable for “rape” in E. Jean Carroll’s civil trial. The trial judge later said the jury’s finding of “sexual abuse” amounted to rape “as many people commonly understand the word.” But Disney bailed on the matter a week before Christmas, just as Stephanopolous was to be deposed. The news blindsided and shocked ABC’s journalists: “No one [at Disney] said a thing to us,” one employee told me. “We had to read about it just like you.”

Trump’s lawsuit against Meta involved his allegation that the company had violated his First Amendment rights in 2021 by locking his Facebook and Instagram accounts, an action the company took as a result of Trump’s role in sparking the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol. Meta restored his accounts in early 2023, but the lawsuit rolled on; the settlement was announced nine days into Trump’s second term.

Paramount’s discussions with Trump reportedly began soon after he sued CBS News and 60 Minutes at the end of October. He alleged at the time that the news program had engaged in “election interference” by deceptively editing clips of its interview with Kamala Harris. That allegation appears to have little basis in fact. CBS released the full transcript and interview footage this week, which validated what the network has long maintained: That its editing didn’t alter the substance of Harris’s responses to correspondent Bill Whitaker, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary. The network used one part of Harris’s response to a question in a piece that aired on Face the Nation, then used another part of the same answer on 60 Minutes, a routine bit of editing in TV news.

In a Thursday segment, CNN’s Jake Tapper highlighted how TV networks edit interviews while arguing that Paramount, in settling, “would be hoisting a white flag of surrender,” and essentially saying that its news division “will not speak truth to power,” but “acquiesce to power at the expense of truth.”

Scholars such as Jones agree that Trump’s legal arguments are weak, even frivolous. But there are other considerations. Meta, for example, appears to be wary of triggering a federal investigation into its business practices (Trump last summer went so far as to threaten to imprison cofounder Mark Zuckerberg), Disney and Paramount own TV stations (Disney has eight; Paramount has 15) whose licenses could be at risk when they are reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump-appointee Brendan Carr. Paramount has even bigger fish to fry: The company is seeking federal approval for a proposed merger with a company called Skydance Media—a deal that could earn Paramount Global chair Shari Redstone billions of dollars once completed (no surprise, then, that Redstone reportedly favors settling Trump’s suit).

The concern that Trump might weaponize the federal bureaucracy is well-founded. During his first term, the Justice Department sued AT&T and Time Warner—CNN’s parent company—to block their merger on antitrust grounds. The companies ultimately beat the rap, but the litigation created uncertainty for both parties, drove up their legal costs, and delayed the merger’s completion.

Paramount and Disney are aware, too, that Trump has an aggressive ally in Carr, his newly appointed FCC chairman. In a chapter he contributed to Project 2025—the conservative blueprint for an overhaul of the federal government—Carr proposed reforming the regulations surrounding Big Tech. But he clearly has his eyes on Big Media too. Among his first official acts last month, Carr reinstated a conservative organization’s petition for investigations into CBS, NBC, and ABC. The petition echoed allegations Trump made in his lawsuits against ABC and CBS.

Even after CBS responded by releasing the full 60 Minutes transcript, the FCC investigation remains open. Paramount continues to discuss settling Trump’s lawsuit.

Notably, Carr’s Democratic predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, had dismissed this petition in her final days as chair, saying the FCC shouldn’t be “the president’s speech police [and] the FCC should not be journalism’s censor-in-chief.” But Carr reversed Rosenworcel’s decision, deeming the matter worthy of further investigation. A Democratic FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez, blasted Carr’s actions as “a retaliatory move” designed to “instill fear” in the networks. Carr, she added, has “shown a concerning pattern of implementing the will of the administration on issues that go far beyond our core responsibilities.”

It isn’t just Democrats like Gomez who find Carr’s conduct troubling. In an interview with VF, Al Sikes, a former Republican FCC chairman, called Carr’s revival of the network complaint “shocking.” The FCC has historically avoided rendering judgments about news coverage, Sikes said, out of respect for broadcasters’ First Amendment rights. “In my time, we stayed out of the free-speech business,” he told me.

Sikes has his own vested interest in this issue. He is a member of a group that in 2023 asked the FCC to deny Fox Corp.’s renewal of its license to operate its TV station in Philadelphia. Sikes’s group argued that Fox’s senior management, including controlling shareholders Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, lacks the requisite “character” to hold the license in view of Fox News’s extensive promotion of Trump’s election lies in 2020 and 2021. Rosenworcel dismissed the complaint when she left the agency last month. Carr declined to put it back into play, despite reviving the complaints against ABC, CBS, and NBC (the FCC didn’t respond to requests for comment).

Carr’s restoration of the complaint against CBS appears likely to increase the pressure on the network’s parent company, Paramount, to settle Trump’s lawsuit—a possibility that has enraged CBS’s journalists, just as Disney’s settlement enraged those at ABC News. Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, privately told his staff this week that he would not apologize for the Harris interview, according to The New York Times. When Trump filed the suit last year, a CBS spokesman said the company would “vigorously defend against it.”

No one’s talking that way now, at least not in public. In fact, as Paramount engages in peace talks with Trump, no one is talking at all. A Paramount spokesperson, Justin Dini, told me this week that the company had no comment about the lawsuit.

Paramount’s newly muted response fits into a broader pattern of accommodation since Trump regained the presidency. Zuckerberg announced last month, for example, that Facebook would end independent fact-checking and modify its content policies to enable previously prohibited speech, as well as terminate the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion program, changes favored by Trump. Meta also named a close Trump ally, UFC boss Dana White, to its board, and contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Zuckerberg was rewarded with a prominent seat on the big day next to a “who’s who” of tech titans, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Bezos’s The Washington Post notably spiked the paper’s endorsement of Harris in October, a move many readers interpreted as Trump-friendly. Amid a blizzard of subscription cancellations, Bezos seemed to double down. He, too, publicly congratulated Trump on winning reelection. Amazon also contributed $1 million to his inauguration.

Another multibillionaire mogul, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, has also become a visible Trump cheerleader. Soon-Shiong killed his newspaper’s endorsement of Harris three days before Bezos did. He later publicly congratulated Trump on winning and praised him for his response to the Southern California wildfires. Soon-Shiong lately has been a prominent booster of Trump’s controversial Health and Human Service nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tweeting 18 times over four days on Kennedy’s behalf. A medical doctor and inventor, Soon-Shiong has an extracurricular interest in staying on Trump’s sunny side: He has three drug applications requiring approval by the Food and Drug Administration. (His spokesperson didn’t return a request for comment.)

So far, there’s no sign of settlement in other lawsuits Trump has pending against journalists and related organizations. The list includes complaints against investigative reporter Bob Woodward and his book publisher, Simon & Shuster; the Pulitzer Prize board (for recognizing reporting on Trump); and the Des Moines Register and its pollster, Ann Selzer (for a preelection poll giving Harris the edge in Iowa.)

Appeasing Trump may make practical sense for chief executives obligated to maximize profits and protect shareholders’ interests. But doing so represents a historical retreat, said Sonja West, a University of Georgia law professor who specializes in First Amendment issues. For decades, she told me, confident (and well-heeled) news organizations fought vigorous legal battles to protect their rights and to defend their reporting. Nowadays, however, the news industry isn’t so confident or so well-heeled. “What we’re seeing today is a concerning shift in that dynamic,” she said. Paying off the president to settle his meritless claims is a losing strategy, and will only invite more of the same, she suggested. “Our democracy depends on the press to serve as a check on powerful people,” West said, “not just to cut them checks for millions of dollars.”