Trump finds new media foe in ABC news amid debate drama

For years, as Donald Trump railed against the news media, CNN was often his favourite target. Now, ABC News is finding out what it is like to be the former president’s punching bag.

For years, as Donald Trump railed against the news media, CNN was often his favourite target. Now, ABC News is finding out what it is like to be the former president’s punching bag.

Trump seized on his growing list of grievances with the network in a Truth Social posting on Sunday, suggesting he might not attend a September 10 presidential debate that ABC is hosting because he is concerned he won’t be treated fairly.

Trump’s tensions with ABC have been on display for months. He sued anchor George Stephanopoulos for defamation and lashed out at an ABC reporter interviewing him at a convention of Black journalists, calling her question “nasty” and the network “terrible.” In his post Sunday, he took aim at another anchor, a political contributor and a top executive at ABC parent Disney.

ABC is now in a tricky position, staging one of the year’s biggest television events without one candidate fully committed. Inside ABC, staffers are proceeding as though the debate is happening.

“News organisations don’t want to be in the news,” said Frank Sesno, a professor of media and public affairs at the George Washington University and a former Washington bureau chief for CNN. “At the end of the day, all this does is to raise the profile of the event.” Meanwhile, the campaigns of Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris have failed to agree on whether microphones should be muted during the debate. The Harris campaign has said both microphones should be live, while the Trump campaign has pushed to keep the microphones muted like they were during a June debate on CNN between Trump and President Biden.

Trump himself said Monday that it doesn’t matter to him. “We agreed to the same rules … but they’re trying to change it,” Trump said Monday.

Trump also criticised Jonathan Karl of ABC News over his interview with Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) on a Sunday show, as well as ABC News Contributor Donna Brazile.

“When I looked at the hostility of that, I said, ‘Why am I doing it? Let’s do it with another network,’” Trump said.

Most major media outlets have been on the receiving end of Trump’s rage at one time or another. He has called the New York Times an “enemy of the people” and BuzzFeed “a failing pile of garbage.” CNN bore more than its share of Trump’s attacks during his time in the Oval Office. He famously told CNN’s Jim Acosta he was a “rude, terrible person” during a 2018 press conference, and at one point his son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, told a top executive at CNN’s parent company that the network should fire 20% of its staff.

Joe Biden looks on as he participates in the presidential debate with Donald Trump at CNN's studios in Atlanta, Georgia. Picture: AFP.

More recently, CNN has gotten something of a reprieve. Trump praised the way anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash handled the first presidential debate with Biden, whose calamitous performance sent his campaign spiralling.

“When he criticises a news organisation, I’m not sure it’s because of a specific complaint about a specific anchor or interviewer or attitude from the network so much as what is tactically useful to him in the moment,” said Nancy Gibbs, the director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the former editor in chief of TIME.

Trump’s defamation suit against ABC and Stephanopoulos followed an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R., S.C.) during which Stephanopoulos said that a jury found Trump liable for the rape of the writer E. Jean Carroll, when the jury instead found him liable for sexual abuse.

Despite that legal fight, Trump agreed in May to the September debate on ABC. At the time, he was set to face off with Biden.

Losing the debate, which will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, would deal a blow to ABC, given the sizeable audiences presidential debates can draw. CNN’s debate in June attracted more than 50 million viewers across more than a dozen networks, according to Nielsen data.

“It’s theatre, it’s spectacle and in many ways ABC benefits from the kind of drama as long as the debate actually does take place,” said Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication of Trump’s comments.

Dana Walden (R), Co-Chairman of Disney Entertainment is good friends with Kamala Harris. Picture: Getty Images for Disney.

Trump also called into question Harris’s relationship with a Disney executive in his Truth Social post on Sunday, asking if “Kamala’s best friend, who heads up ABC,” would leak questions to the Harris campaign. He was apparently referring to Dana Walden, the co-chair of Disney’s entertainment division, which includes all of TV and streaming.

Walden has been personal friends with Harris since the early 1990s. Her husband, the producer and music industry executive Matt Walden, has been friends with Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, since the late 1980s, Disney said.

The Waldens have contributed to Harris’s election campaigns at various stages of her career, and hosted a fundraiser for Harris in 2022. Since she took over responsibility for ABC News in 2022, Walden has declined invitations to Harris’ events, removed herself from any campaign-related activities and tried to keep her distance from Harris and Emhoff to avoid the appearance of favouritism, she recently told people close to her.

Disney says that although Walden is responsible for hiring and firing the executives who run ABC News, she isn’t involved in any coverage decisions and has never sat in on an editorial meeting for the network. Other executives who report to Walden manage the day-to-day operations of ABC’s news operation.

“I think that’s a diversionary tactic being deployed by Trump to try to in various ways discredit ABC,” Pickard said of Trump’s critique.

Dow Jones