Transcript - America This Week, Dec. 20, 2024: "Damn! Defamation Suits Return, and the Killer Folk Legend Ascends"

Pundits throw a fit over a settlement, and the legend of Luigi Mangione expands. Plus, "Damn!" by Charles Portis

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, you’re home, I take it?

Walter Kirn: Yep.

Matt Taibbi: All right.

Walter Kirn: Yes, you can tell by the anchor image in my frame, which is that painting that everybody speculates on. They think it’s depressing, weird, disturbing.

Matt Taibbi: Is it depressing and disturbing? What is it exactly?

Walter Kirn: Well, I hesitate to give away the secret. Maybe on our last broadcast should there be one. But it’s painting that depicts ecological collapse, so it is a little depressing. I think it’s called something like the End of the Universe, or something like that. Anyway, yeah, I’m home. I’m a little dazed. All the chickens come home to roost at Christmas.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: All the projects that are three quarters done have to be four quarters done before Christmas. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling, so I’m dazed, to be honest.

Matt Taibbi: This is the depressing Sunday afternoon of the year. I would say.

Walter Kirn: Yes, Sunday morning coming down.

Matt Taibbi: Exactly. All right. There’s actually been a lot of news this week, but there are a couple of things we want to go over that are personal beefs.

Walter Kirn: Our news.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, our news. Little pet peeves, I would say. So this actually happened, the core thing happened last Friday I guess it was when ABC and Disney decided to settle with Donald Trump over an interview from March, and we’ll get into all the specifics I guess if we have to, but the news came out and we’ll just show you a boilerplate announcement story about that.

Speaker 1: Today, ABC News agreed to give $15 million to Donald Trump’s Presidential Library Project to settle a lawsuit filed by the President-Elect. Trump had sued the network and George Stephanopoulos for defamation after the anchor incorrectly stated on air that Trump had been found liable for rape. ABC has also agreed to post online a note of regret.

Matt Taibbi: A couple of things about this before we get into the meat of this discussion. It’s generally understood in journalism that if you’re not wrong, you should fight. So if somebody sues you and your reporting is correct, even if it’s close, you’re supposed to fight back. So typically when a powerful person sues a company and they settle quickly or before trial, there’s often some blow back within the industry to the extent something along the lines of you folded your hand too early, you should have stuck it out because really there’s a constant drawing and redrawing of where the line is. And so the whole business has an interest in every one of these settlements. So first of all, I guess, Walter, what was your initial reaction? Did you have any initial reaction to that settlement?

Walter Kirn: Well, if you understand the facts, Stephanopoulos repeated this allegation, or I don’t know, as fact that Trump had been found libel for rape. And he did it over and over. He repeated it many times.

Matt Taibbi: 11 times.

Walter Kirn: And apparently at some point he was warned that it was false and he went on doing it. So my initial reaction was, great, awesome. As much as I like to hold the thin blue line for journalism or whatever it is, I can’t see why the liberty to tell lies and repeatedly should be part of our toolkit. They were brushed back and I imagine that they settled because they felt they weren’t going to survive till the next round. So it was no skin off my back to see what was obviously a continuous repetition of a lie be punished.

Matt Taibbi: And yet there was this overwhelming response from the press. We had the former Washington Post writer Paul Farhees say it was an awful precedent and a huge sellout. Barbara McQuade on MSNBC was talking about how it was going to have a chilling effect in the business going forward. And then Chuck Todd gave an interview, Chuck Todd, the former Meet the Press host. It’s funny, we’re going to be saying that a lot, the former or whatever, the former Meet the Press host, giving an interview to former CNN, I guess he may still contribute to CNN, but this was Chris Cillizza, I think on Substack, in an interview and is what Chuck Todd had to say.

Chuck Todd: This was stunning to me and absolutely a gut punch to anybody that works at a major media company because I think it sets a precedent that is going to be very difficult. It’s going to be very difficult to get out from under potentially. I think the risk of losing this suit was 5%.

Chris Cillizza: Right, for ABC.

Chuck Todd: For ABC. So this was a decision to buy off a bad PR.

Walter Kirn: Why was Chuck Todd giving that interview from his front hallway with a view out his front door and at such a terrible angle? I mean, even tech cripples like us know not to do that. He’s really gone low tech. He apparently learned nothing about camera perspective in his years at NBC, but he made some assertions there that were I thought crazy. Oh, the likelihood of losing was only 5%. Is he a lawyer? And also, obviously, ABC didn’t feel that way.

Matt Taibbi: Well, okay. Let’s get into this because there’s a reason why this particular case and this particular moment after the period that we’ve just gone through, why it’s particularly crazy to squawk about this case. So the core case that we all need to know as journalists is New York Times V. Sullivan, which is basically the legal case that establishes what you have to do to get in trouble as a journalist. And the actual lawsuit, it’s a long story. It has to do with civil rights protests in Alabama. It’s complicated. But essentially, Justice Brennan gives this long opinion where he says two really key things, people are going to make mistakes in journalism, that’s inevitable, we can’t punish people just for making mistakes and we also can’t punish people for being extremely critical, even viciously critical.

So if those two things are not, we can’t call those against the law. We also can’t call a combination of those two things illegal. So you can be wrong and you can viciously injure somebody’s reputation at the same time, but because we think the freedom of speech and the multitude of opinions, and he cites Justice Learned Hand about this, talking about how necessary it is that we have this free flowing dialogue. So we’re going to construe offense, legal offense, as narrowly as possible to make sure that the bar is so high that it’s almost impossible to screw up. So you have to be wrong, you have to be defamatory, and you basically have to do it on purpose. You have to do it knowingly.

So they have this standard called actual malice, and let’s see, let me see if I can find the actual quote. Yeah, actual malice, that is, “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” They make it so, so high so that as long as you just stay away from a couple of things as a journalist, you really can’t be sued. I’ve written 10 billion words and I’ve been sued once, not successfully. Walter, have you ever been sued successfully?