Pressure is mounting on Paramount Global from both the inside and outside as it considers settling a high-stakes lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump.
Lawyers for Trump and Paramount entered mediation last week, signaling the company’s potential willingness to resolve the whopping $20 billion suit filed by Trump accusing CBS News of election interference over its handling of the “60 Minutes” interview last year with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
That interview, which was part of a primetime election special that also featured her Democratic running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, earned an Emmy nomination last week for Outstanding Edited Interview. Trump slammed the “totally discredited” Emmys on Truth Social in response.
A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., made a direct plea to Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, to not settle the lawsuit, saying it would be a “grave mistake.”
“Rewarding Trump with tens of millions of dollars for filing this bogus lawsuit will not cause him to back down on his war against the media and a free press,” Sanders and the Democrats wrote to Redstone on Tuesday. “It will only embolden him to shakedown, extort and silence CBS and other media outlets that have the courage to report about issues that Trump may not like.”
Their message may fall on deaf ears as it was previously reported that Redstone was in favor of settling the lawsuit in hopes of paving the way for Paramount’s planned merger with Skydance Media and preventing potential retribution by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has the authority to halt the multibillion-dollar transaction.
Redstone not only wanted to reportedly “keep tabs” on upcoming “60 Minutes” segments involving Trump, she reportedly urged CBS execs to delay any sensitive reporting on Trump until after the merger deal closed with Skydance. That led to the abrupt resignation of “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, who cited his inability to maintain editorial independence.
On the contrary, “60 Minutes” aired a highly critical report last Sunday about Trump’s executive order targeting Democratic law firms who’ve attacked him, the show’s staff essentially thumbing their noses at the corporate honcho.
“Get out of our way and let us keep working how we have been for decades,” one CBS News staffer previously told Fox News Digital.
Journalists on “60 Minutes” as well as “CBS Evening News” directly linked Paramount’s effort to settle Trump’s lawsuit to the company’s merger plans while giving an on-air salute to Owens.
But it’s no longer just stars from CBS’ news division speaking out. “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert called out his corporate bosses Tuesday night in an exchange with his guest, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
“There are reports that the owner of this company called the president – or called the chairman of this company – and said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got to get the news to lay off any bad Trump stories.’ And the word is that that was not passed on to the news division, I’m happy to say,” the CBS star told Maddow.
Liberal critics in the media have lamented the precedent it would set if Paramount settled the lawsuit, which many legal experts have suggested was frivolous, including Georgetown Law Professor and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley, who said he was “unconvinced” by the lawsuit after previously expressing certainty any lawsuit filed over the Harris interview would fail in court.
However, Trump has had a string of settlement victories in recent months with ABC News, X and Meta from other legal battles waged by the now-president.
The CBS lawsuit stems from the editing of an exchange Harris had with “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker, who asked her why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t “listening” to the Biden administration.
Harris was widely mocked for the “word salad” answer that aired in a preview clip of the interview on “Face the Nation.” However, when the same question aired during the primetime special, Harris had a different, more concise response. Critics at the time accused CBS News of editing Harris’ “word salad” answer to shield the then-vice president from further backlash leading up to Election Day.
Earlier this year, FCC Chair Brendan Carr ordered CBS News to hand over the unedited transcript of the interview as part of its investigation into whether the network violated the FCC’s “news distortion” policy after a complaint was filed. CBS had refused to release the unedited transcript when the controversy first began.
The released raw transcript and footage showed that both sets of Harris’ comments came from the same response, but CBS News had aired only the first half of her response in the “Face the Nation” preview clip and aired the second half during the primetime special.
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