https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/abc-pays-the-price-for-george-stephanopouloss-partisan-irresponsibility/
The fickle gods of irony are at work on this one.
As God is my witness: I didn’t even know ABC was being sued by Donald Trump.
Did you? I missed the story completely in late March. I went back to check on what I was doing then, and the answer was writing about “Bloodbathgate,” so I don’t have much of an excuse. (To recall that trifling fake-news kerfuffle from the early campaign is to remind ourselves of how much this election cycle has spiritually aged us.) But, yes, Trump sued ABC News for defamation on March 19, and just yesterday ABC News announced a shockingly large settlement agreement: They will pay him a whopping $15 million — though as a face-saving gesture they are being allowed to pay it to his presidential library as opposed to Trump himself.
It’s all the more hilarious of a victory because I never saw it coming: Trump just got ABC News to agree to being one of the single largest corporate donors to the eventual Official Museum of MAGA Studies. They’re building his library! (To complete the victory, ABC will also cover Donald Trump’s attorneys’ fees, a concession that surely occasioned an enormous sigh of relief from Donald Trump’s attorneys.)
The instigating event actually took place on March 10, when South Carolina representative Nancy Mace appeared on ABC’s This Week, a show that, while I was growing up in the D.C. area, was distinguished by the precise, elegantly patrician demeanor of its host, David Brinkley. Brinkley was famous as one of the last news anchors to insist on writing all of his own copy, which is why it bore such a distinct tone.
Nowadays This Week is the province of diminutive ex–hatchet man George Stephanopoulos, a nasty little Dökkálfr who graduated from slandering groped women on behalf of Bill Clinton and his “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign to gently condescending to the nation in a grizzled sneer on Good Morning America — and did all this so quickly that nobody ever stopped to point out that he simulates genuine human warmth as convincingly as AI depicts floor gymnastics. Stephanopoulos has never pretended to be a journalist: He is a Democratic partisan who holds his position because of his unthreatening height and professional connections with establishment power brokers, not his insight or tendency to ask probing questions.