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    The Great Capitulation

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    At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Donald Trump described recent visits from Tim Cook, C.E.O. of Apple, Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, and other tech barons. “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” he said. “In this term, everyone wants to be my friend.” For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.Since Trump won re-election — this time with the popular vote — many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.Following Jan. 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Trump’s account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as “the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned” Jan. 6 defendants. (It’s not clear if Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He’s pledged a million-dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration, as did the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.After Time magazine declared Trump “Person of the Year,” the publication’s owner, the Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff, wrote on X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.” The owner of The L.A. Times, the billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Trump.As you may remember, a jury last year found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll. In a memorandum, the judge in the case explained that while a jury didn’t find that Trump had raped Carroll, it was operating under New York criminal law, which defines rape solely as “vaginal penetration by a penis.” It did find that he’d forcibly penetrated her with his fingers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ABC to Pay $15 Million to Settle a Defamation Suit Brought by Trump

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      The outcome of the lawsuit marks an unusual victory for President-elect Donald J. Trump in his ongoing legal campaign against national news organizations.ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump.The agreement was a significant concession by a major news organization and a rare victory for a media-bashing politician whose previous litigation efforts against news outlets have often ended in defeat.Under the terms of a settlement revealed on Saturday, ABC News will donate the $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. The network and its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, also published a statement saying they “regret” remarks made about Mr. Trump during a televised interview in March.ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, will pay Mr. Trump an additional $1 million for his legal fees.The outcome is an unusual win for Mr. Trump, who has frequently sued news organizations for defamation and frequently lost, including in litigation against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.Several experts in media law said they believed that ABC News could have continued to fight, given the high threshold required by the courts for a public figure like Mr. Trump to prove defamation. A plaintiff must not only show that a news outlet published false information, but that it did so knowing that the information was false or with substantial doubts about its accuracy.“Major news organizations have often been very leery of settlements in defamation suits brought by public officials and public figures, both because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tom Jarriel, Globetrotting ABC News Reporter, Is Dead at 89

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      In his 37 years at the network, he was a White House correspondent, weekend anchor and correspondent for “20/20.” He won 19 Emmy Awards.Tom Jarriel, a globetrotting, Emmy-winning reporter who was best known for his work on the ABC newsmagazine “20/20” but also served as the network’s chief White House correspondent and weekend news anchor, died on Thursday at a nursing facility in Annapolis, Md. He was 89.His death was confirmed by his son Steve, who said he had a debilitating stroke last year.Mr. Jarriel started at “20/20” in 1979 — a year after it went on the air — and was there for 23 years. His subjects included the child victims of the civil war in Mozambique (including a 9-year-old boy forced by rebels to burn down his own house), the return of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and famine in Ethiopia.“We did not do happy stories together,” Janice Tomlin, his longtime producer, said in an interview. “You had to be in serious trouble for Tom and I to do a story on you.”He considered the defining story of his career to be a series of reports over a decade on the thousands of forgotten, abused and malnourished orphans in Romania. He and Ms. Tomlin found them naked and warehoused in orphanages — some of them dying, others with flies all over them, and others in primitive institutions for what Mr. Jarriel said were unsalvageable children.“In more than 50 institutions hidden in remote areas of Romania, innocent children are locked away like condemned prisoners,” Mr. Jarriel said in one of two reports broadcast in 1990. “These are not the orphanages seen before on American television. These are state-run asylums shrouded in secrecy. This is where children with physical or mental defects are banished by a government which has branded them worthless.”Ms. Tomlin recalled: “We found children in cages, with their heads shaved, four to a crib, some in straitjackets. It was like Auschwitz. The children were dying from malnutrition and fixable things.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Questions Fairness of Next Week’s Debate at a Town Hall

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      Hours after the Trump and Harris campaigns agreed to rules for their first presidential debate, former President Donald J. Trump sought to instill doubt that the debate would be fair, downplayed his need to prepare and suggested he was more worried about the network hosting the debate than his opponent.Speaking at a Fox News town hall on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump insisted that ABC News, which will host next week’s debate in Philadelphia, was “dishonest,” even though he agreed months ago to allow the network to host a presidential debate.Pointing to Vice President Kamala Harris’s longtime friendship with a senior executive whose portfolio includes ABC News, Mr. Trump insisted without evidence that Ms. Harris was “going to get the questions in advance.” The network released agreed-upon rules that no topics or questions would be provided to either candidate or campaign.Mr. Trump’s attempts to question the integrity of the debate echoed a similar effort that preceded his consequential debate in June with President Biden that set off the president’s exit from the race. After taunting Mr. Biden into debating “anytime, anywhere, anyplace,” Mr. Trump sought to play down any potential political consequences as the debate neared by casting the network, moderators and rules as biased.“Beyond the debate rules published today, which were mutually agreed upon by two campaigns on May 15th, we have made no other agreements,” an ABC News spokeswoman said on Wednesday night. “We look forward to moderating the presidential debate next Tuesday.”Yet even as he suggested the debate next week would be biased against him, Mr. Trump also tried to present himself as unconcerned about his first head-to-head confrontation with Ms. Harris since she became the Democratic nominee. He insisted that planning would only get him so far and that he would take a similar approach to Ms. Harris that he did to Mr. Biden.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump y el equipo de Harris aún discuten las reglas del debate

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      Los dos han estado discutiendo sobre si los micrófonos serán silenciados cuando un candidato no está hablando durante el debate, que está programado para el 10 de septiembre.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Donald Trump anunció por segunda vez que participaría en un debate presidencial con la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris organizado por ABC News e insinuó que se había resuelto el tema de si los micrófonos se silenciarán cuando un candidato no esté hablando.Pero una persona informada sobre la postura de la campaña de Harris dijo que el tema de si los micrófonos serán silenciados —algo que el equipo de Trump favorece y el equipo de Harris no— sigue siendo una discusión abierta. Un portavoz de ABC declinó hacer comentarios.Trump escribió en su red social que las reglas del debate “serán las mismas que en el último debate de CNN, que pareció funcionar bien para todos excepto, quizás”, para el presidente Joe Biden.El debate organizado por CNN, que se celebró en Atlanta el 27 de junio, fue calamitoso para Biden, precipitando su decisión del 21 de julio cuando finalizó su campaña de reelección. Durante ese debate, los micrófonos de los candidatos se silenciaron cuando no estaban hablando, una medida impulsada por el equipo de Biden.En última instancia, los asesores de Trump lo consideraron beneficioso para él, ya que evitó que el expresidente tuviera el tipo de arrebatos frecuentes y dañinos a los que es propenso. En su lugar, la atención se centró en Biden y sus luchas para articular sus pensamientos.Politico informó el lunes que el equipo de Harris y Trump habían llegado a un punto muerto sobre si los micrófonos se silenciarán para el debate del 10 de septiembre, que tendrá lugar en Filadelfia.El equipo de Trump acusó al equipo de Harris de engaño. Sin embargo, el propio Trump, en una comparecencia el lunes en Virginia, dijo que personalmente no le importaba.“No me importa”, dijo. “Creo que preferiría tenerlo encendido. Pero el acuerdo era que sería igual que la última vez”.Ammar Moussa, vocero de Harris, dijo en un comunicado que “ambos candidatos han dejado clara su voluntad de debatir con micrófonos no silenciados durante todo el debate para permitir intercambios sustantivos entre los candidatos, pero parece que Donald Trump está dejando que sus manipuladores lo anulen. Es triste”.El debate del 10 de septiembre se acordó por primera vez cuando Biden aún estaba en la contienda. El equipo de Harris planeó mantenerlo, pero Trump vaciló, y luego anunció en una conferencia de prensa hace unas tres semanas que estaría allí. Luego, el domingo, planteó la posibilidad de no asistir después de todo, alegando que ABC estaba sesgada en su contra. El equipo de Harris insistió públicamente el lunes en el tema de los micrófonos.Maggie Haberman es corresponsal política sénior que cubre la campaña presidencial de 2024, desde las contiendas electorales en todo el país hasta las investigaciones sobre el expresidente Donald Trump. Más de Maggie HabermanJohn Koblin reporta sobre la industria televisiva. Es coautor de It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO.” Más de John Koblin More

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      Harris and Trump Squabble Over Debate Rules as ABC Matchup Looms

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      At the weigh-in before a big bout, prizefighters often taunt their opponents in an effort to try to psych them out.So it goes with the presidential pugilists set to meet next month in the city of Rocky Balboa.The Harris and Trump campaigns squabbled on Monday over the ground rules of their coming ABC News debate in Philadelphia, with each side trying to score political points off the other.The tussle began on Sunday when former President Donald J. Trump blasted ABC in a social media post, suggesting that the network’s anchors and executives were biased against him and threatening, not for the first time, to pull out of the event. “I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Mr. Trump wrote.Then, on Monday, Ms. Harris’s campaign went public with an effort to change one of the agreed-upon conditions for the debate: that each candidate’s microphone be muted when it isn’t their turn to speak.“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, told Politico.He added a dig for good measure: “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Almin Karamehmedovic Named President of ABC News

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      Almin Karamehmedovic, the senior executive producer of ABC’s flagship newscast with anchor David Muir, will run Disney’s news division.ABC News said on Monday that Almin Karamehmedovic, the senior executive producer of “World News Tonight with David Muir,” is the network’s next president.The appointment puts Mr. Karamehmedovic, 52, in charge of a diminished but still powerful TV news empire that includes popular shows like “Good Morning America,” “World News Tonight with David Muir,” “20/20” and “Nightline.” He will also oversee the network’s coverage of special events, such as the upcoming presidential debate and election, and the ABC News Studios division.Mr. Karamehmedovic has been at ABC News for more than two decades, working his way up the ranks from freelance video editing to the pinnacle of the TV news industry. His ascension is a positive omen for Mr. Muir, who anchors ABC’s flagship newscast, putting one of his key allies in control of the entire network.Mr. Karamehmedovic said in a statement that he would be leading “the best team in journalism” in his new role.“I approach this role with great respect and humility, not only for the hundreds of colleagues around the world whose tireless contributions fuel the unflinching and unbiased reporting of ABC News but also for the viewers we serve,” Mr. Karamehmedovic said.Mr. Karamehmedovic replaces Kim Godwin, whose tenure was marred by infighting and incessant leaks. Ms. Godwin announced her exit in May.Disney is appointing Mr. Karamehmedovic at a tricky moment for network news. As viewership of traditional TV erodes, networks have developed streaming services like ABC News Live to try to attract and retain viewers. But those services are not the appointment viewing juggernauts that network news programs were in their heyday, when broadcasters like Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather were household names.Mr. Karamehmedovic oversaw one of the genuine success stories at ABC News. “World News Tonight With David Muir” is consistently the most highly rated network newscast and frequently outperforms non-news programs.Mr. Karamehmedovic, who began working for ABC News on a freelance basis in 1998, has held a variety of roles at the network. He embedded with the U.S. Army in 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and traveled to Darfur in 2005 to report on the genocide there. He joined “Nightline,” ABC’s Peabody Award-winning evening news program, in 2008 and served as its executive producer before joining “World News Tonight.” More

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      Trump y Harris acordaron debatir el 10 de septiembre, anunció ABC

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      David Muir y Linsey Davis son los presentadores de ABC que moderarán el primer cara a cara de los candidatos desde que Kamala Harris entró en la campaña.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Habrá debate.La vicepresidenta Kamala Harris y el expresidente Donald Trump se enfrentarán en un debate televisado en horario de máxima audiencia el 10 de septiembre, según anunció ABC News el jueves, preparando el último momento crucial de una contienda presidencial de por sí impredecible.Se espera que el debate de 90 minutos se celebre en Filadelfia, según dos personas con conocimiento de los planes. Los presentadores de ABC David Muir y Linsey Davis serán los moderadores. Es probable que el debate se realice sin público en directo, pero el formato exacto y las reglas básicas aún están por determinarse, dijeron las personas.En cierto sentido, el anuncio mantiene el statu quo: hace meses, Trump acordó debatir con el presidente Joe Biden en ABC en esa misma fecha. Pero el candidato republicano titubeó sobre ese compromiso después de que Biden se retiró de la campaña y argumentó que no había acordado esos términos con Harris.El debate previo, en junio de este año, fue quizá el más importante en los 64 años de historia de los enfrentamientos televisados entre aspirantes presidenciales. La titubeante y mermada actuación de Biden desató el pánico entre los demócratas y provocó que el presidente cediera su puesto como líder de la candidatura de su partido.Más de 51 millones de estadounidenses vieron el debate en directo, el tipo de convocatoria masiva que cada vez es menos frecuente en una era de fragmentación de los medios de comunicación como la actual. La próxima emisión de ABC podría atraer a una audiencia aún mayor porque será la primera vez que Harris y Trump se vean cara a cara en el escenario de un debate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump cancela el debate en ABC News y propone enfrentar a Harris en Fox News

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      Trump dijo en una publicación en redes sociales que el debate presidencial ya pactado quedaba “rescindido” dado que el presidente Joe Biden abandonó la carrera.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El expresidente Donald Trump dijo a última hora del viernes que se retiraba de un debate de ABC News programado para el 10 de septiembre y presentó una contrapropuesta a la vicepresidenta Kamala Harris, su presunta oponente, para enfrentarse en Fox News seis días antes.El cambio, que Trump anunció en su sitio de redes sociales, Truth Social, suscitó objeciones por parte de la campaña de Harris y pareció poner en duda un posible enfrentamiento entre los rivales.Un funcionario de la campaña de Harris acusó el sábado a Trump de tramar el debate de Fox News para distraer la atención de su incumplimiento al compromiso con el debate de ABC. Trump había aceptado ese debate en mayo, antes de que el presidente Biden abandonara la carrera luego de su calamitosa actuación en un debate de la CNN el 27 de junio.“Donald Trump está asustado y tratando de retirarse del debate que ya había acordado y acude directamente a Fox News para sacarlo de apuros”, dijo Michael Tyler, director de comunicaciones de la campaña de Harris, en un comunicado. “Tiene que dejarse de juegos y presentarse al debate al que ya se comprometió el 10 de septiembre”.Tyler dijo que la campaña de Harris estaba abierta a considerar otros debates si Trump cumplía su compromiso con el debate de ABC.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More