On Wednesday, Puck’s Dylan Byers revealed that – in a complete coincidence – ABC’s Good Morning America and This Week co-host George Stephanopoulos “Stephanopoulos has just signed a new, multiyear contract with the network, unrelated to the timing of” the network’s $15 million donation Saturday to President-Elect Trump’s future presidential library as settlement for a defamation suit stemming from Stephanopoulos’s false comments about Trump and the E. Jean Carroll case on March 10.
“Several insiders speculated that Stephanopoulos’s new deal includes a pay cut, and noted that he is likely to eventually take on a more limited role, after already ceding pole-anchor position on special event coverage to David Muir,” Byers added.
For ABC, Byers cited reports that “Stephanopoulos and his co-anchors Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan have historically made around $25 million a year—a gross misalignment of funds, given the declining audience for morning television[.]”
Who would replace Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, perhaps in the near future? NewsBusters wasn’t surprised to see Byers scoop it’d likely be weekend co-host, Saturday World News Tonight anchor, and frequent weekday fill-in Whit Johnson:
Presumably, Stephanopoulos’s heir apparent, Whit Johnson, would deliver similar ratings and cost a lot less.
Indeed, that is where things seem to be headed—albeit with the discretion and diplomatic finesse befitting a revered network veteran who, despite his slip-ups, has earned the right to an elegant exit. Also, as you all know, television news is a business wherein executives and talent air kiss each other at lunch but complain ceaselessly about one another in private…George may be headed toward his next act as a public figure, but no one wants to be the person responsible for it.
The pay cut speculation seems plausible, given the impending departures of Norah O’Donnell from the CBS Evening News and Hoda Kotb NBC’s Today as, while both will stay with their networks, they were likely to be asked to take hefty pay cuts as networks are forced to trim costs in this new media age.
Byers’s scoop was tucked inside an item that was largely a kvetching about ABC settling. Byers griped it triggered “a predictable shitstorm over the weekend among First Amendment advocates, legal scholars, and Chuck Todd types, who rightly noted that Disney would have been in a strong position to win the case had it not caved, and thus expressed fear over the precedent this might set for the media in the Age of Trump II.”
He whined ABC caved despite what he felt was an “error” that “seemed to fall well short of the high bar for defamation of a public figure as established 60 years ago by The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan” and quoted a “one media executive” as having felt “it’s a terrible sign for the news media.”
Referring to Disney’s legal counsel, Byers said they settled because any trial “would have been overseen by an unfavorable judge and a potentially biased jury in the largely pro-Trump Southern District of Florida” and could have ended up before a conservative Supreme Court.
To his credit, at least Byers pointed out the real reason for a settlement: discovery.
“[]There was extremely high concern among leadership over the release of Stephanopoulos’s correspondence and how it might expose the anchor, the news network, and the parent company to greater scrutiny. “He is sloppy electronically,” one source said of Stephanopoulos. ‘They didn’t want the phone going into discovery’” he said.
