Paramount settles Trump’s ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit with $16 million payout and no apology
CNN
By Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly, CNN
(CNN) — CBS News parent Paramount Global has agreed to pay $16 million to resolve an extraordinary lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump over a “60 Minutes” news report last fall.
The long-gestating and highly controversial settlement payment was announced by Paramount late Tuesday night.
Paramount said the $16 million sum “includes plaintiffs’ fees and costs,” and will not be paid to Trump directly, but instead will be allocated to Trump’s future presidential library — mirroring a settlement agreement that Disney’s ABC struck with Trump last December.
“The settlement does not include a statement of apology or regret,” Paramount specified.
But it is still an embarrassing episode for CBS, because legal experts maintained that Trump’s suit was frivolous and that CBS was on solid ground to fight and win the case in court.
“This is a very sad moment for ’60 Minutes,’ CBS News and journalism,” a CBS News staffer told CNN on condition of anonymity.
Other employees also described widespread outrage and disgust about the payment to Trump. But there is also “a slight sense of relief that we can start to put this behind us,” the staffer added.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team, meanwhile, celebrated the deal as a victory, even though Trump had claimed billions of dollars in damages, and wound up settling for a tiny fraction as much.
“With this record settlement, President Donald J. Trump delivers another win for the American people as he, once again, holds the Fake News media accountable for their wrongdoing and deceit,” the spokesman said. “CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle.”
Outside analysts have framed it very differently – as an instance of corporate priorities trumping journalistic principles.
Paramount has been trying for months to complete a lucrative merger with Skydance Media, and the deal requires approval from the Trump administration, in part because CBS owns local stations that are licensed by the government.
This gave Trump a form of leverage over Paramount — and may have put more pressure on the company to pay up.
The Writers Guild of America East, which represents writers at “60 Minutes” and across the news division, said the settlement was a “transparent attempt to curry favors with an administration in the hopes it will allow Paramount Global and Skydance Media merger to be cleared for approval.”
Paramount said Tuesday night that “this lawsuit is completely separate from, and unrelated to, the Skydance transaction and the FCC approval process. We will abide by the legal process to defend our case.”
FCC chair Brendan Carr has also repeatedly said that his merger review process is separate. But before being promoted to chairman, the Trump appointee said complaints over the “60 Minutes” edit would be “likely to arise” as part of the FCC’s merger review.
Carr did not respond to a CNN request for comment about the status of the review on Wednesday.
Press advocacy groups, meanwhile, blasted Paramount for deciding to settle.
“Paramount’s spineless decision to settle Trump’s patently unconstitutional lawsuit is an insult to the First Amendment and to the journalists and viewers of ’60 Minutes,’” the Freedom of the Press Foundation said. The group has vowed to file a shareholder’s derivative lawsuit over the settlement, meaning the litigation over the matter is not over yet.
‘Frivolous and dangerous’
The settlement deal included a promise from CBS that “in the future, ‘60 Minutes’ will release transcripts of interviews with eligible U.S. presidential candidates after such interviews have aired, subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns.”
This is notable because the lawsuit at issue is all about a contested transcript.
Trump’s complaint was about a single question and answer in a lengthy “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. He claimed without evidence that the Harris exchange was deliberately edited to benefit the Democratic candidate and hurt him.
Conservative media watchdogs had noticed that CBS aired two different soundbites from Harris in response to correspondent Bill Whitaker’s question about the Biden administration’s relationship with Israel amid the war in Gaza. One clip aired on “Face the Nation” and another clip aired on “60 Minutes,” which generated confusion on the part of the viewing public.
As criticism mounted and Trump threatened to sue, CBS said it merely edited the vice president’s answer for time, in accordance with television news standards, and it declined to release the full transcript.
Trump went on the warpath, claiming “election interference” and calling it “the biggest scandal in broadcast history.” He accused CBS News of violating a Texas consumer protection law and demanded $10 billion in damages. His lawyers later raised the total to $20 billion.
Legal experts slammed the suit as “frivolous and dangerous,” and CBS defended “60 Minutes” on First Amendment grounds.
Under pressure from the FCC last winter, CBS released the tapes and transcript of the interview, and the raw materials confirmed that it engaged in normal editing, not any nefarious activity like Trump alleged.
Nevertheless, the lawsuit posed a serious problem for Paramount, especially its controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, who stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars through the Skydance deal.
So once Trump took office for a second term, Paramount executives sought to make the lawsuit disappear. Critics of the settlement effort, inside and outside CBS, used words like payoff and bribe to describe the proposed settlement.
At “60 Minutes,” “everyone thinks this lawsuit is an act of extortion, everyone,” a network correspondent told CNN earlier this year.
Several Democratic lawmakers even raised concerns that a settlement might run afoul of anti-bribery laws. The media company may be guarding against those warnings by paying the same amount as Disney.
Paramount co-CEO George Cheeks, speaking at an annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, observed that companies settle litigation all the time for all sorts of reasons.
“Companies often settle litigation to avoid the high and somewhat unpredictable cost of legal defense, the risk of an adverse judgment that could result in significant financial, as well as reputational damage, and the disruption to business operations that prolonged legal battles can cause. Settlement offers a negotiated resolution that allows companies to focus on their core objectives rather than being mired in uncertainty and distraction.”
Normally, however, the beneficiary of the settlement is not a sitting president.
Trump’s multiple media lawsuits
Trump’s CBS lawsuit was part of his larger and ongoing effort to attack major media organizations he deemed unfavorable to him. He sued The Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer last December over a pre-election survey that showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa, which he ultimately won by double digits. Trump claimed the poll violated consumer fraud protections; the Register is currently fighting the suit in court.
He also sued ABC News, alleging that anchor George Stephanopoulos defamed him, and the network ultimately settled that case, creating a blueprint of sorts for the Paramount agreement.
In recent months, the CBS newsroom has been consumed by Trump’s pressure, the prospect of a settlement and the corporate maneuvering aimed at securing the merger’s approval.
That internal strife spilled out into the public view in late April when “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned, citing a loss of editorial independence. Days later, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley called out Paramount on-air, revealing that executives “began to supervise our content in new ways” amid the pending merger. “No one here is happy about it,” he said.
A month later, Wendy McMahon, the executive in charge of CBS News, also resigned. She alluded to a “challenging” past few months in her farewell memo to employees, adding that “It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”
All the while, “60 Minutes” kept producing substantive investigations about Trump and other subjects, including a probe of his efforts to punish law firms he dislikes.
On the news division’s daily editorial conference call Wednesday morning, CBS News president Tom Cibrowski thanked staffers for “blocking out the noise” of the past few months and said it is important to “lock arms” and move forward reporting the news.
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