Bob Costas Denounces Mainstream Media For Folding To Trump
He's won 29 Emmy Awards, and he's pretty damn tired of the media's false 'bothsidesing' that normalizes President Donald Trump to the detriment of basic American principles.
He's Bob Costas.
Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications awarded the legendary sportscaster its Fred Dressler Leadership Award Monday night, and Costas, always one to play it straight, used his acceptance speech to call out Trump ― and coverage of the president by ABC, CBS and CNN.
'The free press is under attack,' Costas said while accepting the lifetime achievement award. 'Democracy as we know it is under attack.'
In December, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to Donald Trump's presidential library to settle a defamation suit over George Stephanopoulos' saying Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll when he was technically liable for sexual abuse.
Costas slammed ABC for folding to Trump.
'All they should've said was, 'George misspoke. The president, that paragon of virtue, was only found guilty of sexual assault, not rape. So we stand corrected,'' Costas told the audience in comments relayed by Mediaite. 'They didn't have to pay a $15 million ransom.'
(The judge in the case also said the verdict didn't mean that Caroll 'failed to prove that Mr. Trump 'raped' her as many people commonly understand the word 'rape.' Indeed ... the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.')
Costas also took aim at CBS for attempting to settle a Trump lawsuit that First Amendment experts have called 'frivolous and dangerous.'
The president sued CBS's parent company, Paramount, for $20 billion because he believed a '60 Minutes' interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris was deceptively edited... and it also made him sad.
Paramount is pursuing an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media, which requires the approval of Trump's Federal Communications Commission appointee Brendan Carr.
'Paying $20 million in ransom to Trump is just the cost of doing business when there's billions of dollars at stake,' Costas lamented. 'These are ongoing assaults on the basic idea of a free press.'
He then called out the false balance that other outlets seek when they report on Trump:
Because he is the president, to a certain extent, who he is and what he does, and what is done in his name, has been normalized so that responsible journalists have to pretend that there's always two sides to this. There really isn't two sides to much of what Donald Trump represents.
If someone says – and the idea that you have to find somebody who will not just defend Donald Trump, but valorize it, even on CNN or wherever else, just in the name of being balanced – look, if someone is contending that the Earth is flat, in order to appear objective, you are not required to say, 'Well, maybe it might be oblong.' No, it's not.
Certain things are just true. And regrettably, something that's true in America right now is that the President of the United States has absolutely no regard, and in fact has contempt, for basic American principles and basic common decency.
Anticipating attacks from fans of his who say they no longer value his opinion since 'he turned political,' Costas was ready.
'You know what? If that's what you think, and that's how you think, and you think it in defense of that guy, I wear that as a badge of honor.'
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