Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Corporate Media SHAMES THEMSELVES for Trump, DISGUSTING…

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Popok takes on Disney, ABC, Amazon, WashPo, Apple, Facebook, and the LA Times who have all abdicated their First Amendment and freedom of the press duties, as they cowardly settle with Trump and pay him millions of dollars to protect their assets and government contracts. Upgrade your wardrobe instantly and save 25% OFF during the @PublicRec Holiday Sale at https://publicrec.com when you use promo code: LEGALAF #publicrecpod Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I didn't get a chance to give you my opinion about ABC News and Disney, its parent company's decision, crass, craven decision to just stroke a check for $16 million to Donald Trump rather than fight, fight for the First Amendment, fight for freedom of press, the way its ancestors had done in the old timey times of the 70s and 80s when newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times broke stories like the Pentagon Papers and brought down a corrupt criminal president like Richard Nixon, not Disney, not ABC. They had a winning case about defamation and the extent that you can charge a news organization

with defamation, and they decided rather than risk it and risk all of their relationships and their licenses and their regulators with Donald Trump they would just pay. And I'm here at Midas Touch Network to talk about it. Let me put this in perspective. First you already know the news by now. There was there was a case that Donald Trump filed. We thought it was a joke case. It would never go further than summary judgment, let alone to trial, which Donald Trump didn't like the fact that when George Stephanopoulos was interviewing Nancy Mace, yes, the person who doesn't want her transgender colleague to use the bathroom, when Nancy Mace was being interviewed and George Stephanopoulos asked,

I think in March, about the E. Jean Carroll case in which two separate juries adjudged Donald Trump to be a technical rapist, a sexual abuser under New York law, and awarded her over a hundred million dollars in total, he used the term, he used the R word. R word. He didn't use the sexual abuser word. Now, Judge Kaplan has already cleared that up in a number of his orders in the case. When Donald Trump tried to use the exact same tactic against E. Jean Carroll, who's not a member of the press, to try to bring her down and try to counterclaim against her, and he dismissed the counterclaim and said, you can't use the counterclaim against her because you think that you're not a rapist.

You are, this is the judge now, you are technically a rapist. Just because New York law at the time said that because Ms. Carroll couldn't identify what was being inserted inside of her, whether it was your finger or it was some other body part, the jury went with sex abuser. But let it be known, you are technically a rapist. That's the judge. And I thought, all right, well, that's going to kill many future cases. And then Donald Trump, for publicity sake, brought a case for, I don't know, $100 million against ABC and Disney and George Stephanopoulos. And we analyzed that illegal AF and we said, what the actual AF?

That case is never going to go anywhere. Disney and its corporate lawyers, who are skilled in the First Amendment, are going to tear this apart. Sure, the judge originally denied a motion to dismiss, but she wanted to get to a case on the merits. so go through discovery. And just the other day, the magistrate judge ordered Donald Trump to a deposition. I mean, Stephanopoulos too, but Donald Trump to a deposition on the way to a summary judgment. That would have ended this case in ABC's favor.

But no, the corporate suits and ABC and Disney decided they didn't want to take on Donald Trump because they're worried about their FCC licenses, because they're worried about their relationships with government, because they're worried about bills that could go after Disney, because Disney already had a very public fight that they didn't do well with the governor of Florida, who I'm sure was pushing on this one, Ron DeSantis over taking away their tax benefits in Disney World in Orlando. They didn't wanna go through that again. So they decided to bend over and pay. They shouldn't be paid.

They should have been paid by Donald Trump. $16 million, $15 million to go towards a presidential library or something related to Donald Trump's legacy and a million dollars to pay his attorney's fees. He didn't rack up a million dollars in attorney's fees. He filed one complaint with a guy in Coral Gables, Florida, nobody's ever heard of. Probably cost him 30 grand at most. They paid him a million dollars for the case. Okay, so what's going on here? Well, in 2017, let's remember that Donald Trump put a lot of pressure on ABC at the time. And because he didn't like the coverage, or actually, I'm sorry, CNN at

the time, and he didn't like the coverage that CNN was doing of him. So he tried to stop the sale of CNN through its parent company, the Time Warner. This is what corporate America, who's not independent media, is worried about. They're worried about their stockholder prices. They're worried about their licenses. They're worried about picking a fight with Donald Trump, who buys ink by the barrel and has everything at his resources and can push all the levers of power with regulators that drive them crazy. And they didn't want that.

And they sacrificed their obligation as a supposed news organization. I'm talking about the ABC News part. They sacrificed that on the altar of their greed to make sure that they're, you know, they'd rather not lose the paper, lose the news over this issue. Now, Catherine Graham, the Washington Post, when she took on Nixon, she could have risked her entire fortune in the paper, but she did it anyway.

The New York Times with Watergate and the Pentagon paper is the same thing. What does it tell us? It tells us that corporate media and billionaires who own and control news outlets can't be trusted. They can't be trusted because when the rubber meets the road, they will side with the dictator. They will side with Donald Trump. And now they've taught the world and they've taught the next Donald Trump that all they got to do is sue them and they will fold like a cheap

card table. And look at look at what we've seen in the last 90 days. It just in the last 90 days it tells you all you need to know about the fact you can't trust corporate media because they're not they're not interested in the First Amendment. They're only interested in dollars and cents. You got the LA Times owner, a pharmaceutical billionaire named Patrick Soon-Shung, who bought the LA Times for $500 million and has decided he's not going to respect the historic wall that was always between publisher side, the owner of the paper and the editorial side. That's what made our paper strong.

The publisher did not interfere with the editorial side of how the voice of the paper, its opinions, right? It just ran the paper over here. Sometimes they crossed over on an important story like bet the company type story, bet the newspaper type story, but generally they did not. Editorial board wants to write for Kamala Harris

an endorsement of Kamala Harris. They write an endorsement, publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris, but no. The LA Times told the editorial board, stand down, you're not writing the Kamala Harris endorsement, even though they wanted to. In fact, the only article they ran instead was something, maybe Trump's not so bad.

That's what they ran instead of to cover that hole. The wallpaper over it was a pro-Trump piece in the LA Times because of this billionaire, right? So you can't trust the LA Times anymore. Washington Post, who owns the Washington Post? Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos is best friends with Jared and Ivanka, their neighbors in Florida. They socialize and party together. And more importantly, Amazon and its cloud computing part of its company has over $ billion dollars worth of contracts with the

military. A 9 billion dollar contract with the Department of Defense, a 725 million dollar contract with the US Navy, a 21 billion dollar contract generally with the government. One of the single biggest predictors of how long you live and how good you feel while living is your metabolic health. Now I strongly believe that you can't manage what you don't measure. And metabolic health can be difficult to measure. This is why I use levels to track my daily health metrics

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I don't know how long this offer will last. So if you've been interested in learning more about your metabolic health, now is the time to get started. And Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which he's and he's a fraud. He had the balls to tell people when he bought the paper, change the slogan on the masthead, put up their democracy dies in the darkness. You know where democracy dies, Jeff? You know, I know you've been running around, I know you've been strolling around the country

with your trophy wife and trophy girlfriend on your whatever thousand foot yacht, you know, where they had to take down bridges, you know, in order to get your yacht underneath it. I know you're not connected to the real world, but you know where democracy dies? When a newspaper like the Washington Post, who used to bring down corrupt presidents, right, instead decides that they are going to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris because it's not good for business and not good for your relationships with Ivanka, right? And you're going to contribute

money as well to the inauguration. And Apple's doing the same thing. And Facebook's doing the same thing. Because Zuckerberg, you know, these are the same people that in 2017 and towards the end of the administration were out against the immigration policy of Donald Trump. They were taking strong positions against the Muslim ban and all sorts of other things because it affected their bottom line. But they were like, we're going to, they're not fighting back anymore.

This is the first wave of fascism. You voluntarily put your neck under the jackboot of the fascist. This is what happens when corporate America takes over your media and your papers. We don't have First Amendment freedom of speech. We have it here on the Midas Touch Network, on Legal AF. We don't have it there. I can't trust the, I mean, maybe the New York Times, because the New York Times doesn't have a lot of government contracts and it's owned by one family effectively.

But the rest of them? Forget about it. You can't trust any of them. Look what they've done and they think it's fine Facebook Amazon Apple They all think you don't you're suckers well We're suckers that we're willing to continue on Facebook continue to use Amazon continue to use Disney in ABC And then we have no other choice.

We have a choice. I'm putting up a poll on my Legal AF YouTube channel about, are you going to cut ties with ABC and Disney now because of what they've decided to do and the message that they've sent to undermine our democracy? These are the girders that uphold our democracy. There's no other way to put it. First Amendment, freedom of the press, you know, holding, you know, speaking truth to

power, holding truth to power, as we like to say around here. This is what separates us, not man from the beast, separates democracy from communist dictatorship or socialist dictatorship. This is what separates it, but we can't separate it anymore. Not when the corporate media and its licenses are controlled by people who are willing to sacrifice our core constitutional values

in order to save their own hides. And the sad part is, ABC and Disney, you would have won that case. I practiced in the Southern District of Florida. I practiced in front of the judges that you're in front of. I practiced in front of Judge Altenaga. I've handled defamation cases. You are going to win that case. No doubt. There's no doubt in are going to win that case. No doubt. There's no doubt in my mind they win that case.

The difference between a rapist and a sexual abuser, there's no daylight to allow for a defamation charge under the law. And the fact that it was a slip of the tongue, I think that was all absolved by Judge Kaplan, who had announced that Donald Trump was a technical rapist. What, a Stephanopoulos left off the word technical?

And how did that disparage or undermine Donald Trump's reputation in the eyes of whoever? I'm not even sure he's, I've said this before, I'm not sure he's a person who can be defamed because you have to have a certain reputation, a certain reputation of honor and valor in order to be defamed. Does he have that? With all the judgments against him? He's a fraudster? He's a sexual abuser?

A serial sexual abuser of women? He's been a judge that? He's been a judge to be a fraudster? He's a convicted felon? How do you defame that? Because you didn't put technical in front of rapists. ABC news lawyers should be ashamed of themselves, Disney's should be ashamed of themselves, but they're not.

Because they saw what happened and they're worried about what happened with Fox News when Fox News ran all those reports against Dominion voting systems, right? And brought on all those crazies that work for Donald Trump like Sidney Powell. You know, they had to pay $780 million. They were never going to pay that to Donald Trump. For what? For properly reporting? For a reporter asking a member of Congress in public about how she can support somebody and if it matters to her that he's been a judge to be a rapist I'm sorry a technical rapist. I'm sorry a sexual abuser That's a case he wants to litigate that that splitting hairs about which abuse of women he performed

Uh, you know, it's just mind-boggling to me it just shows you why I think we have an audience here on Midas Touch and on Legal AF. I've been saying we don't blow smoke or sunshine for the last four and a half years. Nobody tells me what to do. I don't get a phone call from Ben Mycelis or from the brothers. Like, Popak, you know, that's, we don't want to go there any longer. You know, if you do, we're going to yank you off the air I we don't get that here

They trust me they trust me in my judgment they trust me in my editorial viewpoint They know what they're getting when they put popak on the air Right, that's just the way it is that's the way it should be there should be a separation between the corporate side, the ownership side, the business side, and the editorial side. And not what we just saw with the LA Times and the Washington Post and Amazon, and now Disney and ABC. And the list will go on. I mean, I left out because I'm running out of time here,

but MSNBC, please. No wonder morning Joe and his wife are off the air for a period of time, had a regroup after this very public, you know, ass kissing down at Mar-a-Lago. Oh, I know the reporting. Oh, we gave it to them while we were there. Oh, we didn't pull punches at our meeting.

I'm sure that's not true. I assure you that you pulled all of your punches as you were being served tea and biscuits by one of his butlers, okay? Was Walton out of there? That would be interesting. The guy that was indicted for at Mar- To go to the scene of the crime is amazing,

where our top secret documents were hidden and stored by a president, a former president. Just mind boggling. We'll continue to follow it all on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF. Come over and follow me on the Legal AF YouTube channel. Hit that blue subscribe button. Help us build another pro-democracy,

independent YouTube channel. You need it, need it now more than ever. And then I got a new show called Popak Live on Tuesdays, 8 p.m. Eastern time right here on this YouTube channel. This is a pretty good idea of what I do there. I'll see you on my next Popak Live. This is Michael Popak reporting. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network,

we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this pro-democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories, the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at Legal AF MTN. That's at Legal AF MTN.