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The front page of Monday’s Washington Post bubbled over with liberal panic after ABC News settled with President Trump over George Stephanopoulos repeatedly smearing Trump on his show This Week as “liable for rape.” Somehow, that’s not as hostile or combative as Trump’s rhetoric. 

Media reporters Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr are all about pushing scary talk about Trump oppressing his haters in the press. The headline: 

Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media

Press freedom advocates say they fear that the second Trump administration will ramp up pressure on journalists, in keeping with the president-elect’s combative rhetoric.

“Press freedom advocates” are apparently those who think Stephanopoulos should be free to say all kinds of nasty things about Trump. Saying nasty things about Trump is their idea of journalism. 

Ellison and Barr says this settlement has “spurred concerns that his efforts could drastically undermine the institutions tasked with reporting on his coming administration, which Trump has promised will take revenge on those he perceives as having wronged him.”

If someone said “Jeremy Barr is liable for rape,” would it just be he perceived being wronged? 

They turned to lawyer (and Kamala Harris donor) David Korzenik to admit that gee, media law hasn’t suddenly changed, but “the atmosphere and hostility to the press is intense, and that emboldens plaintiffs of all kinds.” So the media can dish out intense hostility to Trump, but they can’t take it. 

Then came the anonymous sources within Trump’s orbit: 

The pressure from Trump and his allies on the media is already growing and will continue to intensify, according to two Trump aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive internal deliberations.

In the two months before the presidential election, Trump attacked the media more than 100 times in public speeches or other remarks. 

At the very least, the Post admitted ABC didn’t want public eyes on its internal communications: 

Continuing with the case might have made public any damaging internal communications to and from Stephanopoulos. If the case made it to trial, it would face a jury in Florida — a red state that Trump carried by 13 points — that could side with the president-elect and award a penalty that could easily exceed the price of a settlement.”

The story included cheers from Steve Bannon and boos from former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd: ““This was stunning to me and absolutely a gut punch to anybody that works for a major media company.” Law professor RonNell Anderson Jones added “The concern here is that we might be seeing a confluence of forces — legal, political and social — that work together to erode the confidence we once had in the vibrancy of the American press,” and “pressure other media outlets to self-censor.”

Now ask if the media’s four years of downplaying or ignoring Biden’s cognitive decline defines “vibrancy” or knuckling to Democrat pressure to “self-censor.” 

Ellison and Barr closed with an “expert in polarization,” without imagining that the expert is saying polarizing stuff: 

Experts in polarization said that Trump’s posture toward the press has eroded trust in the Fourth Estate. From the Oval Office, he can do even more.

“My concern is what he does when he has the power of the U.S. government in his hands,” said Liliana Hall Mason, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. “It looks to me like all the guardrails have been removed, and we are in for a presidency unlike any we’ve experienced before.”