Just days after ABC News settled a massive defamation lawsuit for lying about the then-former president, President-elect Donald Trump said Monday he would be suing other members of the corrupt media. The message is clear — if the propaganda press cannot stop peddling lies, then they will be held accountable.
While holding an unscripted press conference Monday at Mar-a-Lago (that perhaps lasted longer than all the unscripted press conferences President Joe Biden has done in four years), Trump went after CBS News for the deceptive editing of the “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We’re filing one on ’60 Minutes’ where they took Kamala’s answer, which was a crazy answer, a horrible answer, and they took the whole answer out, and they replaced it with something else she said later on …” Trump said.
It is unclear whether Trump is referring to a new suit or a suit that was previously filed in November against the network. The November suit was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas alleging that the deceptively edited video amounted to “unlawful acts of election and voter interference” and intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the election, according to CNN.
Trump also said Monday he would be filing a suit against former pollster Ann Selzer, who released a poll days before the election showing Trump losing deep red Iowa to Vice President Kamala Harris by three percentage points. Trump alleges the poll was designed to discourage Republican turnout and amounted to election interference (Trump ultimately won the state by nearly 14 percentage points). NBC News reported Tuesday that a suit was filed in Polk County, Iowa, seeking “accountability for brazen election interference.” According to the report, Trump “is making the claim under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which prohibits deceptive advertising.”
His comments come on the heels of ABC News agreeing to fork over $15 million to Trump’s presidential library in order to “bail out big-mouth anchor George Stephanopoulos for his false assertions that Trump had been found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll,” The Federalist’s Matt Kittle wrote.
And perhaps Trump’s pursuit of truth in journalism is already having the intended effect. Axios’ senior counsel recently warned their journalists to do their job properly — aka do not defame someone. According to Semafor, Axios’ senior counsel warned staff the Trump administration “will ramp up lawsuits against news organizations for defamation.”
CNN’s Jim Acosta, however, said the “industry” has to “stand firm” because “you can’t have the news industry worrying about this sort of stuff when they’re simply just doing their jobs.”
“Doing their jobs” is slandering a political figure they’ve spent years maligning? That’s not “journalism,” that’s propaganda. It shouldn’t have taken threats of accountability to compel outlets like Axios to remind their staff to deliver factual information to their audience — and CNN shouldn’t wait for a potential lawsuit to change their practices despite Acosta insisting the industry “stand firm” in their current practices.
The corporate media’s longstanding practice of using deception to mislead their audience and maligning those they disagree with is no longer going to be condoned. If the only way to make corporate media stop lying is hitting them where it hurts, so be it.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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