Mainstream media is being criticized for not being hard enough on Trump

Sportscaster Bob Costas has opinions on how the media is covering President Donald Trump’s second term.

Costas was at the Mirror Awards in New York to receive the Fred Dressler Leadership Award for his “distinct, consistent and unique contributions to the public’s understanding of the media.” But it wasn’t enough to simply accept his award with grace and move on, he had to make a political statement while doing it.

First, he lambasted ABC News for settling a lawsuit with the president after alleging George Stephanopoulos made defamatory comments about him in 2024.

“Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape,” Stephanopoulos said at the time.

The jury had not found Trump liable for rape, but for sexual assault in the case of E. Jean Carroll, though the president still maintains his innocence in the matter.

“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 advised. “They didn’t have to pay a $15 million ransom.”

Next, he targeted Paramount for their attempts to settle a lawsuit with the president, which he has rejected. The company’s attempts to merge with Skydance Media would require the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is the suspected motivation behind the effort to settle things quickly and quietly.

“And did Shari Redstone, because she wants to affect a merger that Trump’s FCC can stand in the way of, did she have to besmirch and undercut the gold standard in our lifetime of broadcast journalism, 60 minutes?” Costas questioned. “Paying $20 million in ransom to Trump is just the cost of doing business when there’s billions of dollars at stake. These are ongoing assaults on the basic idea of a free press.”

And he didn’t stop there. Despite acknowledging that the media isn’t perfect and has some “blindspots and misplaced narratives,” he still couldn’t help but take swings at Trump.

“But if the answer to that is MAGA media, if the answer to that is Donald Trump’s view of the world, which is only through a prism of what benefits him, there are no higher ideals. There are no principles at work other than what benefits him. I’ll stay with where we are without correction if the correction is what Donald Trump represents,” the sportscaster said. “And what also has happened here is that, 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,” he objected. “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.”

“And again, and I’ve heard this on occasion. ‘I used to love Bob Costas, but then when he turned political…’ And of course, when I did that, every good thing I did for 40 years was washed away. Now I suck. 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,” his rant concluded.

Writer/Columnist

Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to BizPac Review.

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