AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump secured a $15 million payment from ABC News and a note of regret. It was part of a settlement of a defamation lawsuit that Trump brought against the network. Now, Trump says he feels that he has to sue other news outlets because the press is, quote, "very corrupt." NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins us now with more. Hi, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hey. OK, so let's first talk about Trump's lawsuit against ABC News. What was at the heart of that case?
FOLKENFLIK: So this involved George Stephanopoulos, one of the chief anchors at ABC News, one of the cohosts of the public affairs show on Sundays called "This Week." And he was pressing a Republican congresswoman, Nancy Mace, over her support of Donald Trump - the former president, then surging in the Republican primaries back to renomination - over why she would support him given that she had, as she had poignantly attested, been the victim of rape early in life and that Trump himself had been found liable for rape in a civil case. Now, let me be very clear - Trump was not found liable for rape in a civil case. A jury declined to find that against him. What he did find - it did find against him, from an incident stemming years earlier, was that he had - it found - was liable for sexual abuse.
CHANG: Right.
FOLKENFLIK: A judge kind of confused the matter a little bit while trying to clarify by saying in the public record, look, most people would call what Trump did and what the jury found him liable for, would call that rape conversationally, in their common understanding, but that's not what fits under the technical and specific definition in New York State law.
CHANG: OK. So Trump sues for defamation. And let's be very clear - there is a very, very high legal bar for public officials to win defamation cases. And Trump obviously is a very public official. Why wouldn't ABC want to battle this out in court? Why settle?
FOLKENFLIK: Your legal training's showing again there, Ailsa. You know, look; I think we have to hold two ideas in our head at the same time. One is Stephanopoulos did screw up, and it's kind of baffling to me that ABC didn't clean that up relatively promptly after he did it. He could have made that clear, would have moved along. He could have pointed the judge's wording on that.
Secondly, I spoke to six media lawyers over the weekend, and all but one said they had an exceptionally strong case in part because of that bar that you're talking about - the standard created under a 60-year-old Supreme Court ruling that basically is intended to make sure there's a lot of running room for robust public debate. And also, you have what I think lawyers say is substantial truth in what Stephanopoulos said. Not precise, not fully fair, but substantially true, and that can be said to be helpful in a court of law.
You know, we don't know. What ABC said was it's happy to be moving past this and for this to be resolved. Obviously, ABC News wants access to the Trump administration as it comes back to power. And its parent company, Disney, has a heck of a lot of business interests. Yes, they've got deep pockets and a lot of lawyers, but they're going to have a lot of things that are under review from officials in the Trump administration in the years ahead.
CHANG: Well, I understand that Trump took something of a victory lap today when he gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. What did he say, exactly?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, he talked about how many folks he's already suing. He's suing CBS. He's suing the, you know, celebrated investigative reporter Bob Woodward, who he's sat for a bunch of interviews with. He's suing the people (ph) behind the Pulitzers. And he's suing the recently retired pollster for The Des Moines Register for getting that poll wrong just days before the election. Trump said he feels he has to do this, and here's why he says it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: I shouldn't really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else, but I have to do it. It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press. Our press is very corrupt.
FOLKENFLIK: He said the press is almost as corrupt as our elections - something else he hasn't proven.
CHANG: That is NPR's David Folkenflik. Thank you, David.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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