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The one-way street of settlements has the pundit class in a tizzy over ABC News’ decision in the defamation suit brought by President-elect Donald Trump.

Earlier this year, an argument with South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace (R) found “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos repeatedly claiming that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in his legal battle with E. Jean Carroll. That language was met with a lawsuit from the GOP leader that led to a $15 million settlement over the weekend that had staffers and talking heads up in arms.

According to independent journalist Yashar Ali, “ABC News talent and staff I’ve been talking to over the past few hours are stunned and furious about this settlement. Their anger primarily stems from the fact that they have faced repeated budget and compensation cuts in recent years, experienced layoffs, and yet the network — even if insurance paid it — has paid this huge sum of money to settle this matter.”

Without acknowledging any error on the part of Stephanopoulos, many narrative peddlers appeared stymied at the decision by ABC News to avoid taking the suit to trial on the heels of an avalanche of commentary that assigned wrongdoing to Pete Hegseth for a settlement with his sexual misconduct accuser despite settlements affirming neither guilt nor innocence.

Sharing his own coverage on the settlement, Brian Stelter, chief media analyst for CNN, captioned his recent appearance on the network, “The big [question] about the Trump-ABC settlement: Why did ABC agree to pay and apologize? The network won’t say. It could have kept fighting in court, but decided to pay $$ to end the dispute and make the case go away. (A common move, but with an unusual plaintiff, the president-elect.)”

Attorney Marc Elias, who served former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, sounded off on the decision by ABC News by asserting the outlet had chosen “obedience” as many viewed the outcome as suggesting unchecked propaganda would no longer be the order of the day.

Amid the reactions that had rampant TDS sufferer Bill Kristol opining, “ABC’s settlement with Trump feels like it could be an inflection point in the Orbanization of our politics. I hope it isn’t,” social media users outside the bubble of the corporate media landscape were prepared to disabuse attempts to maintain perpetuated narratives brought against Trump and other anti-establishment figures.

This included suggestions that the situation could have been much worse for ABC had Stephanopoulos been made to sit for a deposition to explain his adamancy in repeating the claim against Trump when given the opportunity to rescind it.

A similar point was even raised by Stelter who wrote, “One theory: Maybe the pre-trial ‘discovery’ process unearthed emails/texts that made ABC look bad or would be advantageous to Trump’s lawyers in other ways. (Remember Fox/Dominion?) Settling seals the case and lets ABC (and parent company Disney) move on.”

Kevin Haggerty
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