THE RESULT OF THE DISNEY SURRENDER
The thing many people miss in looking at Hitler’s takeover of Germany is how fast it happened. Within 30 days of his acceptance of the Chancellorship on January 31, 1933, the Reichtag had passed the Enabling Act in the aftermath of the Reichstag Fire, which enabled Hitler to rule by decree. Before real resistance could be organized, it had been kneecapped.
Within weeks after that, trade unions and the Christian Democrat, the Socialist and the Communist parties had all been declared illegal. Hitler had wiped out his political opposition by mid April. The first prisoners arrived at Dachau concentration camp the first week of May - they were all political prisoners; any Jew among them was there for politics.
A similar speedy move against political opponents is building within the coming Trump administration.
For years, Trump has brought defamation suits against news organizations who have demonstrated their temerity in accurately reporting his crimes. All have been unsuccessful because the organizations he sued said on being served the papers for the suit, “See you in court.” Trump always dropped the suit when it got to the point he was going to have to sit for a deposition, because every lawyer who represented him knew he couldn’t survive a deposition; on the very few occasions where he did sit for a deposition, he was caught perjuring himself.
Until this past weekend. Until Disney - a company with a market cap of $200 billion - decided that $16 million was “the cost of doing business,” chump change, and settled a suit they had every likelihood of winning, a suit Trump was likely to drop this week after a judge ordered him last Friday to sit for a deposition no later than this coming Friday.
Disney isn’t in the news business. They own ABC and a few other “news” organizations, but those entities are not major revenue centers. Disney is in the business of running parks like Disney World and Disneyland, and they are not interested in being targeted again as they were by Governor DeSantis in Florida.
So they settled. As Josh Marshall put it today, the $16 million was their initiation fee for joining TrumpWorld.
Several legal commentators have recently written about the possibility that Disney settled because they were worried that if they did win with the New York Times v Sullivan defense - which they almost certainly would have - that Trump would appeal his loss to the Supreme Court, where two of “his” six judges have already expressed a willingness to return to Times v Sullivan with a view to overturning it and getting rid of the “actual malice” rule regarding public persons suing for defamation.
A return to “ordinary” defamation, where all a litigant needs to establish is that the defamatory statement made is false, with no reference to “actual malice,” would mean that news organizations would pull back from aggressive investigations of individuals like Trump. We would experience a sharp drop in press freedom to publish.
However, Disney’s surrender also creates a precedent that leaves an opening for politically-motivated defamation suits. The result of this is also that news organizations will be reluctant to aggressively pursue a story, since their corporate owners who are not in the news business and do not care about freedom of the press, may not choose to support the news organization they own in such a fight.
In other words, heads Trump wins and tails Trump wins.
The Disney surrender is almost as good as the Supreme Court overturning Times v Sullivan in intimidating news organizations.
Saturday night, Steve Bannon spoke at the Gala put on by the New York City Young Republicans. The Guardian reported what he said:
“We want retribution and we’re going to get retribution. You have to. It’s not personal, it’s not personal. They need to learn what populist, nationalist power is on the receiving end.
“I need investigations, trials and then incarceration. And I’m just talking about the media. Should the media be included in the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump? Should Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC, and Rachel Maddow, and all of them?
“We want all your emails, all your text messages, everything you did. You colluded in a conspiracy with Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Monaco and Jack Smith.”
Rachel Maddow may be “The $100 million woman” of progressive media, but she and others not as well-situated as she is have to wonder if their corporate overlords will defend them against spurious conspiracy charges, as news organizations would have in the days before the billionaires’ takeover of mainstream media. In Maddow’s case, would whatever is left of MSNBC - after the company was put in Brian Roberts’ “SpinCo” and separated from Comcast-Universal - have the resources to be able to do so? Would the Intergalactic Widgetmaker that purchases the “SpinCo” be willing to invest their resources in her defense? Would ABC risk having Trump’s FCC commissioners pull its broadcast license for defending Jake Tapper?
And after they’re finished ripping apart the major media, what happens to Meidas Network?
I am not advocating surrender. It will take awhile for them to work their way down to That’s Another Fine Mess, and in the meantime their corruption and incompetence in all else they try to do will be working against them. We of the new “alternative media” will likely survive by being the small mammals who stay out of the meadow where the big dinosaurs stomp.
I am pointing out that despite their corruption and incompetence, their inabilities to work and play well with others that will tie them in knots of their own making, there is a lot of chaos MAGA can create while they ultimately tear themselves apart.
And that chaos will only be strengthened by the willingness of billionaires like Bezos and Zuckerberg - who have bigger fish to fry than defending the free flow of information, and for whom a million dollar initiation fee to pay off Trump is couch change - and the corporations like Disney - to bend their knee to Trump the dictator. Their examples will encourage others to take the road of least resistance.
Trump has told us he intends to be a “dictator on day one.” He’s preparing to do exactly that right out in front of us, and the news media isn’t too likely to pay even as much attention as they have so far to what’s going to come.
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