This Week (ABC)

Overview

This Week is ABC’s Sunday-morning political affairs program — and the least-covered fact about it is the most consequential one: it is the show that cost ABC News $16 million. The March 10, 2024 interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, in which anchor George Stephanopoulos repeatedly said Donald Trump had been “found liable for rape,” is the interview at the center of Trump’s defamation suit and ABC’s December 2024 settlement (New York Post; AFP). Nearly every profile of the program describes its anchors and its ratings; almost none treats it as the origin point of the network’s most expensive legal liability of 2024. This one does.

The interview that settled a lawsuit

Stephanopoulos was interviewing South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace on March 10, 2024, when he repeatedly asserted that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll civil case — language his executive producer had repeatedly warned him not to use, according to the New York Post’s reporting two years later (New York Post). The Post’s account says the warning came more than once, and was specific to that phrasing. Trump sued ABC for defamation, and on December 14, 2024 the network settled: $15 million to a Trump presidential foundation and museum, $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees, and an editor’s note attached to the interview article (AFP). For a program whose format is built on one high-stakes interview per Sunday, the episode showed what happens when a single answer becomes a courtroom exhibit.

The show as Brinkley built it

This Week hit the airwaves in 1981 as ABC’s answer to NBC’s Meet the Press and the successor to Issues and Answers, with David Brinkley leaving NBC to moderate it (Network News Music). Brinkley’s lasting contribution was structural: he added the roundtable panel — a debate among informed guests after the interview — and the device worked so well that rival networks imitated it (Network News Music). Brinkley stepped down as moderator in 1996 but kept contributing commentary; the Associated Press reported that his final sign-off, on September 28, 1997, closed a 54-year broadcasting career, with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson then hosting the program (AP; Network News Music). The show continued under later anchors and, by 2012, was again billed as This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

The modern lineup

The program’s current shape was set by two personnel moves. In January 2016, ABC News president James Goldston named Martha Raddatz co-anchor, with Raddatz and Stephanopoulos alternating weekends and Jonathan Karl as their primary substitute; Goldston’s internal memo boasted the program had just ranked first in the A25-54 demographic for the first time in 22 years (TheWrap). In January 2021, Karl joined them as a third co-anchor while continuing as chief Washington correspondent, also picking up his own interview show on ABC News Live (Adweek). Leadership turned over again in May 2026, when Jon Schlosberg was named executive producer, reporting to ABC News president Rick Klein, after helping build the network’s streaming-era programming including Prime with Linsey Davis (TheWrap).

February 2026: the Blanche interview in detail

The February 1, 2026 edition of This Week gave Stephanopoulos a full Sunday with the Justice Department’s number two. Blanche told the program the department’s review of the Epstein files was complete — “we reviewed over 6 million pieces of paper, thousands of videos, tens of thousands of images” — and pushed back on survivors and lawmakers who said the release was insufficient and riddled with redaction failures (ABC News). The interview ranged well beyond the Epstein files. Stephanopoulos pressed Blanche on the charges against former CNN journalist Don Lemon, arrested with another independent journalist, Georgia Fort, after anti-ICE protesters disrupted a January 18 church service in St. Paul: “When do you believe that Mr. Lemon crossed the line from reporting on what was going on to criminal activity?” Blanche declined to comment on the specifics — “that indictment is now public” — but said of Lemon’s conduct, “If anybody in this country thinks that that is, quote, ‘independent journalism,’ I would like to have a conversation with you” (ABC News). The two also sparred over Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over leaked tax returns, with Blanche calling the conflict-of-interest question “fair” and saying the department would “navigate that appropriately and consistent with the ethical rules” (ABC News). The broadcast also noted that Trump was separately seeking a roughly $230 million settlement from the Justice Department over past investigations into him (ABC News). It was the classic This Week format — one anchor, one power player, and a transcript that generated days of follow-up coverage.

September 2026: credentials on the line

Eight months later the chair held Martha Raddatz, and the subject was the press itself. On September 18, 2026, the administration deactivated the press credentials of correspondents from CNN, MS NOW and Politico; on September 27, Raddatz pressed Deputy Attorney General Blanche on the move. Blanche called press credentials “a privilege and not a right,” and described Raddatz’s framing of the deactivations as “extraordinarily disingenuous” — an exchange that became the story of the Sunday (Daily Caller). By then the courts had already intervened: U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered a 14-day pause on the deactivations (Daily Caller). Two interviews in one year, both with the same deputy attorney general, both making national news for the friction between the questions and the answers.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not assert the exact November 15, 1981 premiere date, which appears only in snippet-level and Wikipedia-indexed sources, none of which were read in full here. It does not trace the interim hosting history between 1997 and the Stephanopoulos era, which no fully-read source covered this session. It does not report the program’s current ratings position, for which no fully-read 2026 source was found. And it presents the claim about Stephanopoulos being warned by his executive producer as the New York Post’s reporting, not as an independently confirmed fact.