By Settling Trump’s Laughable Lawsuit Against CBS, Paramount Strikes a Blow at Freedom of the Press
Paramount, which owns CBS, has agreed to settle a laughable lawsuit in which President Donald Trump depicted the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris as a form of consumer fraud that supposedly had inflicted damages “reasonably believed to be no less than” $20 billion. Compared to that risible claim, the amount that Paramount has agreed to pay—$16 million for legal expenses and a contribution to Trump’s presidential library—is pretty puny. It is also less than the $25 million that Trump reportedly demanded during negotiations with Paramount. It is nevertheless $16 million more than Trump deserved based on claims that CBS had accurately described as “completely without merit.”
This humiliating settlement starkly illustrates how the powers of the presidency can be abused to punish news outlets for constitutionally protected speech. It does not bode well for freedom of the press under a president who has no compunction about weaponizing the government against journalists who irk him.
“A cold wind just blew through every newsroom this morning,” Robert Corne-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in an emailed statement. “Paramount may have closed this case, but it opened the door to the idea that the government should be the media’s editor-in-chief.”
Although CBS initially said it would “vigorously defend” against Trump’s lawsuit, Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, decided that the company’s business interests would be better served by throwing in the towel. Redstone, The New York Times notes, “has said she wants to avoid a protracted legal war with the president that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardize other divisions that have business with the government.”
Another possible consideration was Paramount’s pending merger with Skydance Media, which is subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) because it entails the transfer of broadcast licenses. “Some executives at the company viewed the president’s lawsuit as a potential hurdle” to that multibillion-dollar deal, the Times reports, although both Paramount and Brendan Carr, the FCC’s Trump-appointed chairman, have insisted that the president’s phony grievance against CBS “was not linked to the F.C.C.’s review of the company’s merger with Skydance.” That is hard to believe, especially since Carr decided to reopen a “broadcast news distortion” investigation of CBS based on the same pre-election interview that Trump claimed had cost him more than his net worth.
Trump’s beef with CBS News focused on Harris’ answer to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker suggested that Netanyahu was “not listening” to the Biden administration’s concerns about the war in Gaza and had “rebuffed just about all of your administration’s entreaties,” here is how Harris responded:
Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region. And we’re not going to stop doing that. We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.
On October 6, Face the Nation promoted the Harris interview with a clip that included the first sentence. The interview as aired on 60 Minutes the following day used the last sentence. In other words, the latter show’s producers were telling the truth when they said they had used the “same question” and the “same answer” but “a different portion of the response.” By contrast, Trump was flat-out lying when he claimed CBS “100% removed Kamala’s horrible election changing answers to questions” and “replaced them with completely different, and far better, answers, taken from another part of the interview.”
Harris did not come across as especially forthright, articulate, or intelligent in either version, although the one that 60 Minutes showed was a bit more concise. But as Trump saw it, the decision to use the last sentence instead of the first one amounted to “Election Interference.” It was an “UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL” and “a giant Fake News Scam” that was “totally illegal.” By editing the interview to make Harris “look better,” he said, CBS had committed an offense so egregious that the FCC should “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE”—by which he presumably meant the broadcast licenses held by CBS-owned s
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