President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against the media may have had a greater impact than originally thought, according to two legal analysts.
During his second administration, Trump has collected about $86 million in payments from media companies and tech firms through various legal cases, according to reports. That includes a $15 million payment from ABC’s parent company, Disney, over claims made by anchor George Stephanopoulos about whether Trump had been found “liable for rape.”
However, ABC’s recent lawsuit against the FCC revealed that the pressure campaign’s impact went beyond the network’s pocketbook, as Adam Klasfeld, editor-in-chief of All Rise News, noted during a new podcast episode on Thursday.
“The content of ABC’s programming has also been impacted by the administration’s public threats. As an example, ABC considered that the administration wanted the speech broadcast live and might take adverse action against ABC if it did not. And ABC decided to live stream it instead, which it ordinarily would not have done,” Klasfeld quoted from the lawsuit, noting that it was “a hell of an admission to put in parentheses.”
Klasfeld also pointed out that ABC’s lawsuit refuted a central point of Trump’s argument — that he had been censored for political reasons.
“ABC’s lawsuit makes the point that there are often presidential prime-time addresses from other presidents that do not get aired and that the pressure campaign in this particular instance was the government pressuring what they choose to air,” Klasfeld said.
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