Bob Costas: Trump’s attacks on the media are unlike anything in my lifetime

New York
CNN
 — 

“The free press is under attack,” Bob Costas said at an awards ceremony Monday evening. “Democracy as we know it is under attack.”

The famed sports broadcaster was at the Edison Ballroom podium in New York, accepting a lifetime achievement Mirror Award for his “distinct, consistent and unique contributions to the public’s understanding of the media.”

What began as a speech reflecting upon a 50-year career in sports journalism quickly became a scorching sermon about the state of sports media and the threats to the free press coming from President Donald Trump.

“What’s happening now are not matters of small degree,” Costas, 73, said of the Trump administration’s attacks on journalism, including personal lawsuits, FCC investigations, and crackdowns on press access. “They’re different in kind to anything certainly in my lifetime and maybe in the history of the American presidency.”

The president “intimidated ABC into reviewing George Stephanopoulos,” Costas said of the network settling Trump’s 2024 defamation lawsuit brought against it after the star anchor repeatedly said on-air that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case when a jury had found him liable for sexual abuse.

“All they should have said was George misspoke,” the sportscaster said. “They didn’t have to pay a $15 million ransom.”

Costas then turned his attention to CBS News. “Did Shari Redstone — because she wants to effect a merger that Trump’s FCC could stand in the way of — did she have to besmirch and undercut the gold standard in our lifetime of broadcast journalism, ‘60 Minutes?’”

Redstone, 71, currently controls Paramount Global, the global media company that owns CBS News. She is seeking to sell her stake in the company as part of a merger with Skydance Media, but the deal needs approval from the Trump administration. As a result, Redstone has reportedly sought to settle the president’s lawsuit against CBS over a “60 Minutes” segment — a lawsuit that legal experts have repeatedly deemed bogus — sparking outcry from the network’s journalists.

“Paying $20 million in ransom to Trump is just the cost of doing business when there’s billions of dollars at stake,” Costas remarked. (ABC and CBS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

“These are ongoing assaults on the basic idea of a free press,” he said.

“It does not mean that we are without fault,” Costas said. “It does not mean that the legacy or mainstream media doesn’t screw up from time to time or have blind spots or misplaced narratives.”

However, he added, “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… I’ll stay where we are.”

“I used to love Bob Costas, but then he turned political,” Costas said he’s often heard from sports fans. “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.”

Costas has often drawn criticism from fellow sports broadcasters for using his perch to bring attention to political issues. In one particularly famous instance in December 2012, he devoted his “Sunday Night Football” segment to make a plea for gun control after a Kansas City Chiefs linebacker shot and killed his girlfriend and then himself outside the team’s practice facility.

Costas, who left NBC Sports in 2019 after 40 years there, also lamented the current state of sports broadcasting, which he said “tragically” lacks in-depth coverage of the political and social issues intimately connected to the games themselves.

Such issues, he said, “need to be covered, not during the game, not in between pitches, or in between free throws, but at some point need to be covered.”

Costas suggested that broadcasters have become deferential to the sports leagues, avoiding interrogative questions or controversial topics altogether. “With all the hundreds and hundreds of hours of coverage, let’s say, of the NFL, can’t there be a ‘Meet the Press’-style interview of (commissioner) Roger Goodell somewhere?”

He quipped: “Sports isn’t brain surgery, but it doesn’t have to be brain dead either.”