FT称迪士尼等媒体集团正加强反击特朗普政府法律与监管压力

‘Appeasement is not a strategy’: how media is fighting back against Trump’s legal threats
Even by the standards of today’s Washington, it was an unusual spectacle: a Federal Communications Commissioner applauding a company’s decision to sue the agency on which she serves.
This week Walt Disney launched an attack on the US media regulator, accusing it of a “retaliatory campaign” against the group’s ABC television network. Its aggressive response to the US media regulator and its Trump-appointed chair, Brendan Carr, is in sharp contrast to the state of play just after the 2024 election, when its owner Disney paid $15mn plus costs to quickly settle a suit by then president-elect Donald Trump.
That move — along with another $16mn settlement at CBS — raised concerns that media companies would be more likely to cave in under pressure during the emboldened president’s second term.
But there are growing signs of media groups’ willingness to stand firm against a litigious president. Trump is fighting multiple legal battles — and seeing some initial setbacks — against media organisations including the BBC, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Some media executives and analysts see growing strategic merit in fighting these cases, with one eye on the midterm elections in November, which could shift the political landscape.
“Fear [of Trump] doesn’t really work the way it used to,” said media analyst Claire Enders. “Disney can see the midterms coming up and is aggressively protecting their rights. Media owners can see beyond Donald Trump.”
News media have faced a renewed barrage of attacks from Trump in his second presidency, including frequent criticism of individual journalists and organisations whom he has long labelled “enemies of the people” and “fake news”.
However, the reignited rivalry between the administration and the media has shifted from the White House briefing room to the courts in his second term.
“In his first term, it was more just talk,” said Bob Corn-Revere, a First Amendment litigator and chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “In his second term, he’s been taking more actions, and that’s been facilitated by the fact that he has surrounded himself with lower-level officials who appear willing to do pretty much anything.”
The difference now was not just that media groups are less likely to self-censor or settle with the administration, said Marty Kaplan, research professor of communication and journalism at the University of Southern Califorina.
“Media companies now understand that appeasement is not a strategy,” said Kaplan. “They are taking the initiative.”
Lee Levine, a retired lawyer who represented journalists and news organisations, said some outlets “naively” capitulated to the president, akin to major law firms facing Trump’s ire, thinking “if you placate him, the storm will pass”.
“That turned out, obviously, not to be the case,” he said, calling the news organisations’ moves a kind of “buyer’s remorse”.
Disney sued the FCC last week over what it called a “retaliatory campaign” against the group’s ABC television networks over the content of its broadcasts. The regulator in April ordered an early review for the renewal of licences — the first time this has happened in more than half a century — and is separately investigating whether the ABC talk show The View violated broadcast rules.
Trump has repeatedly called for the FCC to revoke ABC’s licences, including attacks after Jimmy Kimmel, who hosts a late-night show on the network, joked that first lady Melania Trump looked like an “expectant widow”.
Carr said in an interview with the FT this year that the Disney review was not related to Kimmel’s comments. Disney alleges that the “timing underscores the commission’s true purpose: coercing and retaliating against a network that refuses to bow to the administration’s demands”.
Anna Gomez, the regulator’s sole Democrat, also accused the FCC of waging a “sustained, co-ordinated campaign of censorship and control” against Disney and ABC.
For ABC, Trump and Carr were “the gifts that keep on giving” because “they can’t keep their mouths shut”, Levine said.
“Without having to dig and find information that’s otherwise hidden about what their motives are, they just tell you,” he said. “And if there’s one thing that seems absolutely deadlock-certain in First Amendment law, it’s that the government can’t wield its power to punish someone because they have the temerity to criticise or publish or broadcast information that the current holders of political office disagree with.”
The Disney suit also makes explicit what many in the industry have been saying privately: that media companies consider the risk of retaliation by Trump when they make editorial decisions. Proof, the suit said, was ABC’s decision to livestream a Trump speech out of concern that the president could attack the network if it did not.
“ABC was aware that the president wanted the address to be broadcast live, and considered the risk of resulting administration retaliation,” the broadcaster said in a filing.
Disney made it clear that the impact of pressure from the White House went “well beyond ABC”.
“If the administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable: tell only the stories the administration deems favourable, or face the coercive machinery of the federal government.”
The FCC said the agency had been examining claims that Disney engaged in “illegal DEI discrimination” for more than a year. It said that Disney’s lawsuit showed the company was “obviously very concerned about the FCC’s proceeding”.
The Disney lawsuit marked an unusually firm stance against the administration, legal experts say, reflecting the unprecedented nature of the threat to its rights under the First Amendment.
“I wouldn’t say that the media feels more ‘emboldened’ these days but more concerned about the assault on First Amendment rights by this administration than any in our history,” said Floyd Abrams, senior counsel in Cahill Gordon & Reindel’s litigation practice group.
“No FCC in the past has ever played such an overtly political and thus threatening role than the current one.”
Daniel Suhr, president of the conservative Center for American Rights, which has backed the administration’s efforts, contended that the FCC “stepped out” of its regulating role for decades, under chairs of both parties, and “unsurprisingly, the media evolved in a no-guardrails environment”.
The president’s style with the media has not changed, but Carr was now “moving forward with the president’s approach”, he said.
“Chairman Carr is, I think, reinstalling some of the basic guardrails that Congress first put in place, and that have really always been part of our broadcasting tradition up until the last few decades.”
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team told the FT the president would “continue to hold accountable those who traffic in lies, deception and fake news for their reckless and politically motivated efforts to defame him, the Maga movement, and the American people”.
Soon after Trump’s second election in 2024, he sued ABC and Paramount, owner of the CBS News Network. Both donated millions of dollars to Trump’s presidential library to settle lawsuits — moves that raised concerns that media groups would be more pliable in his second term.
Since then, Trump’s lawsuits against other media outlets have met firmer opposition. He is moving to amend his defamation claims against both the BBC and the New York Times after the organisations sought to dismiss them.
Trump, his businesses and administration have also faced lawsuits from the Associated Press over access, NPR over funding and, most recently, over the sale of faster access to his posts on Truth Social by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
In July, the justice department dropped efforts to subpoena four journalists at The New York Times after the newspaper published a story about security concerns aboard the new Air Force One aircraft.
But Trump is still suing The New York Times over its coverage, including a story about his TV show The Apprentice. The Times argues that Trump has failed to “plausibly allege actual malice”. Trump has said he will “continue to hold The Times and their ‘comrades’ in the Mainstream Media accountable”.
Trump also wants to amend his lawsuit against the BBC after the British broadcaster sought access to financial records to see whether his claim of financial harm was accurate.
The BBC has asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit and is now attempting to subpoena members of Trump’s family. The BBC case showed the power of “disclosure as a strategy”, said Kaplan, even if few in the broadcaster want a long and costly case.
Trump also needed to refile an amended $10bn defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal after it published a lewd drawing it alleged was made and signed by Trump that was included in a birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein. Trump denies that he made the drawing.
“He’s writing a playbook as he goes,” Levine said. “And there will be somebody, or some bodies, who will consider themselves the heirs to his coalition or his base, and view this as one of the major tools in their arsenal.”
An “unintended byproduct” of the legal battles might be fresh case law making it more difficult for future administrations to likewise target the press, he added.
“Disney was one of the very first to — if you want to use the term — capitulate to the Trump administration in the very early days, but now clearly it needs to act,” said Jon Miller, a veteran media executive and chief executive of Integrated Media Co, which owns a portfolio of media and creator ventures.
“It’s a lawsuit with real potential for success. And if so, it will very much embolden other media companies.”
But for now, as Disney, the BBC and other companies argue with Trump in court, there is a sense that time is starting to be on their side.
Included in their calculations, say some media experts, is the fact that lawsuits could take up to two years and potentially land on the other side of a Trump administration.
“It’s a decent bet that Trump and co are gone in two years,” said Kaplan. “The administration can be defeated by the same lawfare efforts that they normally try — getting them tied up in the courts.”