Tag: CBS

CNN
 — 

Journalists, including some at CBS News, are expressing alarm at reports that CBS parent company Paramount Global is trying to settle a legally dubious lawsuit lodged by President Donald Trump last fall.

Trump sued CBS after an October “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris – Trump’s opponent in the presidential campaign – included an edit that Trump said was unfairly favorable to Harris. Despite legal experts’ widespread assertion that CBS’ editorial judgment was protected by the First Amendment, The New York Times Thursday night reported that a settlement was in the works.

That sparked outage in CBS’ newsroom.

“Trump’s lawsuit was a joke, but if we settle, we become the laughingstock,” a CBS correspondent said on condition of anonymity.

CBS in October called the suit meritless and said at the time “we will vigorously defend against it.” A Paramount spokesperson on Friday declined to comment. A lawyer for Trump, Edward Paltzik, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he told The Times that “real accountability for CBS and Paramount will ensure that the president is compensated for the harm done to him.”

The Times noted that “a settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation.”

Indeed, a settlement by Paramount could look like a payoff. Specifically, it would look like a big check to Trump (or his presidential library, following in ABC and Meta’s footsteps) in exchange for regulatory approval of Paramount’s pending deal with Skydance Media.

“That’s called a bribe,” Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, commented on X.

Is it the cost of doing business in the Trump era? Some business leaders appear to believe so. But settling with Trump would also cost CBS some of its hard-won credibility.

The suit stemmed from “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker’s sit-down last October with Harris.

Observers noticed that CBS aired two different answers from Harris to a single question about why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “not listening” to the United States. The answer Harris gave in a preview clip differed from the answer she gave on the actual “60 Minutes” broadcast.

Trump and his allies claimed that CBS had manipulated the interview to make the vice president look better. As criticism mounted and Trump threatened to sue, CBS said there was nothing nefarious about the editing; “the interview was not doctored,” and the newsmagazine “did not hide any part of the Vice President’s answer to the question at issue,” CBS News senior VP for legal affairs Gayle C. Sproul said.

Sproul also cited case law that defends editing and news judgments, noting that “editing is a necessity for all broadcasters to enable them to present the news in the time available, and that is what ’60 Minutes’ did here, as it does with its other reports.”

Trump sued anyway. His lawyers filed a complaint in US District Court in the Northern District of Texas, alleging CBS violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a consumer protection law.

Legal experts contacted by CNN at the time called the suit “frivolous;” “ridiculous junk;” and laughable on its face. From the alleged damages ($10 billion!) to the decision to give Fox News the scoop about the suit, it had all the hallmarks of a political PR stunt.

But a few days after the suit was filed, Trump won the election. All of a sudden, the suit posed a serious threat to the news division’s parent company, Paramount Global, according to a person involved in the matter.

That’s because the merger requires the blessing of the Trump administration, in part because CBS owns local stations that are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, known as the FCC.

Outside analysts, citing Trump’s transactional nature, predicted that Paramount may have a hard time getting the necessary federal approvals. Brendan Carr, who Trump promoted to chair the FCC, recently revived a pro-Trump group’s complaint about the “60 Minutes” interview. Back in November, he said the complaint would probably factor into the agency’s review of the Paramount-Skydance deal.

On Friday, CBS confirmed that the FCC sent the company a “letter of inquiry” asking the network to hand over the unedited transcript and tapes of the Harris interview.

“We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do,” a CBS spokesperson told CNN.

As an FCC license-holder, CBS is obliged to respond to reasonable requests from the government agency. But those requests are typically about technicalities like broadcast transmission signals, not the raw materials of a news program like “60 Minutes.”

The notion of Paramount caving to Trump has sparked condemnation. After the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago reported that settlement talks were a possibility, Sen. Bernie Sanders urged CBS to “stand tall.”

Sanders wrote on X, “CBS may be reaching a legal settlement with Trump because he didn’t like how a campaign interview with Kamala was edited. Really? If CBS caves, the belief that we have an independent media protected by the First Amendment is undermined.”

Trump’s history of bullying media companies suggests that a payout by Paramount won’t stop his pressure campaigns.

In the weeks before his inauguration, ABC agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit against the network. Earlier this week Meta agreed to a $22 million payout over another Trump lawsuit.