STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Why did ABC News settle a lawsuit with President-elect Trump? The TV network is making a $15 million donation to Trump's future presidential library and also posting a statement of regret. That is the settlement over remarks by anchor George Stephanopoulos during an interview. The settlement comes just as an incoming administration talks of using the power of government and the legal system to penalize news coverage they don't like. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik is covering all this. David, good morning.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What was the lawsuit about?
FOLKENFLIK: So let's go back to March - Donald Trump, a former president surging in the Republican primaries, Stephanopoulos on the Sunday public affairs show "This Week." He was speaking with Nancy Mace. She's a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, used to be a real critic of Trump, became a supporter of him. She had talked poignantly about how she'd been raped as a teen. And George Stephanopoulos is saying, well, then why do you support Donald Trump? And he kept saying relentlessly, look, he was found liable in a civil suit of rape. Well, that's not actually quite right. He was found liable of sexual abuse, and the jury in that civil trial did not find him liable of rape. What the judge said in the case pointedly, however, was that what he was found liable for did fall under the definition of what everybody in America in common conversation might understand to be rape but that it didn't fit under the precise technical definition of rape under New York state law.
INSKEEP: I'm just thinking about that. So according to the judge, this is something of a subtlety. And it's involving a public figure, where normally you can have very, very wide latitude to say all sorts of things. What had legal experts said about the merits of Trump's case against ABC News?
FOLKENFLIK: Sure. I spoke to six First Amendment media lawyers over this weekend, and they kind of agreed with my gut instinct on this. They said what George Stephanopoulos did was a screw-up, and a number of them said they would have expected ABC and Stephanopoulos to clarify the distinction pretty promptly. But they also said this should have been a pretty easy call to defend in court because what Stephanopoulos said was close to what the judge said. But in precise, there's kind of a case law defense of something being substantially true.
And, as you point out, you know, public figures - you know, under a major court case decided by the Supreme Court called New York Times v. Sullivan 60 years ago, they gave great protections to what people say in the press and in public about public officials to allow for sort of a rolling and roiling freedom of speech about politicians - that you don't have to be perfect. And so you can say things that are critical about public figures, and they can't just use the courts against you. A president or a former president or a future president would be somebody at the very top of the pyramid of public figures.
INSKEEP: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It matters who you are. If you're totally a private citizen, maybe if somebody says something terrible about you, you can sue. It gets harder when you get more famous. So why, in this case, did ABC News settle?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, it remains a mystery why they didn't clarify. But why did they settle? They say they're happy to be past it. We don't know exactly. But this is a major amount of money, particularly for a public figure. It also comes at a time as a number of news organizations and a number of owners and leaders of news organizations appear trying to make peace with Trump. You think of the killed endorsements of Vice President Harris in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post. You know, a top executive over at ABC News was seen at Mar-a-Lago meeting with a key incoming figure in the new Trump administration.
And finally, this is all, of course, at a time when incoming President-elect Donald Trump and the officials around him have suggested a strong not only willingness but intent to use the powers of government against the press - the powers of regulation - a desire to go after reporters and publishers over printing government secrets and now very much the courts as well.
INSKEEP: NPR's David Folkenflik, thanks so much.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
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