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The Delicious CBS News Settlement, and What It Portends | The American Spectator

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July 2, 2025
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The Delicious CBS News Settlement, and What It Portends | The American Spectator

You may have seen the news Wednesday that President Trump has settled what was a $20 billion lawsuit with the parent company of CBS News over its edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris for much less. From CBS’ own reporting of the settlement:

Paramount will settle President Trump’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris for $16 million, the company announced late Tuesday.

CBS News’ parent company worked with a mediator to resolve the lawsuit. Under the agreement, $16 million will be allocated to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library and the plaintiffs’ fees and costs. Neither Mr. Trump nor his co-plantiff, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, will be directly paid as part of the settlement.

The settlement did not include an apology.

Paramount also agreed that “60 Minutes” will release transcripts of interviews with presidential candidates in the future, “subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns,” the statement said.

And there was a certain modicum of embittered editorializing:

Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, filed last October when he was still a candidate for president, was widely viewed as an attack on the First Amendment. He took issue with CBS News airing two different portions of Harris’ response to a question about the Middle East, one in an early excerpt on “Face the Nation” and the other on the full broadcast of “60 Minutes.”

The lawsuit was filed in Amarillo, Texas, a portion of a federal district court where the sole judge is a 2019 Trump appointee, and it was based on a state consumer protection law that is intended to prevent advertisers from misleading the public about a product being sold. CBS News is not headquartered in Texas, nor did the interview take place there.

And just a bit more…

First Amendment scholars and constitutional experts largely viewed the lawsuit as a frivolous misapplication of the law.

Geoffrey R. Stone, a First Amendment scholar and law professor at the University of Chicago, explained, “That statute is about sales — a salesperson can be held liable for stating that a product has certain positive effects when he knows it doesn’t. But CBS is not engaged in advertising here.”

Constitutional law expert and Harvard professor Noah Feldman called the case an “outrageous violation of First Amendment principles.”

Politicians had also spoken out about the suit, urging Paramount Global Chair Shari Redstone not to settle. The day after McMahon announced her departure, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden sent a letter to Redstone raising concerns that efforts to settle with Mr. Trump would amount to bribery. Redstone had recused herself from settlement talks.

Were I to engage in a bit of common vernacular, I might characterize this reporting as “butthurt.”

The $16 million in cash, none of which is to be paid directly to Trump or Rep. Ronny Jackson, who joined the suit as a co-plaintiff after it was filed, seems like a small amount in comparison to another Big Media settlement of recent vintage. Trump settled a suit against ABC News for $20 million arising from ABC’s Sunday news show host George Stephanopoulos’ calling him a rapist in an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace.

That was one throwaway comment by Stephanopoulos. This was an entire 60 Minutes segment containing an interview with Harris cut to make her come off as sentient when the original footage, forcibly released by order of the Federal Communications Commission, clearly showed otherwise. You’d think the payout would be a little more in this case.

And it turns out that it is.

Somehow, the Washington Free Beacon was able to report more about the CBS News settlement than CBS News was:

CBS News parent company Paramount has agreed to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit that accuses CBS’s flagship news program, 60 Minutes, of editing an interview last year to benefit then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. CBS and Paramount will pay a sum that could exceed $30 million in total, according to a source familiar.

Wait, what? I thought it was just $16 million. It’s $30 million?

In addition to the lump sum payment, it is anticipated that CBS will air eight figures worth of advertisements, PSAs, or similar content promoting conservative causes for free, a source familiar with the negotiations and settlement deal told the Washington Free Beacon. While Paramount’s current brass has disputed that provision, the incoming management team that is expected to take over after the company’s merger with Skydance plans to honor it, the source said.

Paramount did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Yeah, I can imagine they didn’t.

So CBS News and the current suits at Paramount don’t want to talk about the convincers that got Trump to lay his guns down. But the beneficiaries and allies, if not outright comrades in arms, of CBS’ newsroom denizens sure are squawking about all of this, and it’s deeee-licious…

And of course there has to be screeching by Liz Warren…

This one might be my favorite…

Give these folks credit, they’re certainly very mindful of the fact that Paramount is desperately trying to conduct a merger with Skydance Media, the colossally well-heeled diversified film and TV production company fronted by David Ellison — he’s the son of mega-rich Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

And you can detect a bit of bitterness over that merger, can’t you? Why would all these people have such disdain for Skydance acquiring Paramount?

Could it be that Larry Ellison has long been one of the bigger donors to Republican candidates and causes? Yeah, could be.

In fact, as we’ve discussed in this space, the Biden FCC never got past cool on the idea of Skydance gobbling up Paramount even despite David Ellison’s dropping a $900,000 money bomb on Dirty Joe’s doomed reelection campaign last year.

Liz Warren didn’t call that a bribe, though it was a hell of a lot closer to one than Paramount’s surrendering to Trump for essentially his legal costs, some adoption of best-practices safeguards against future propagandistic editing of CBS News interviews, and a truckload of free avails for the MAGA movement to air messaging on Paramount’s various channels and platforms.

As bribes go, this doesn’t quite register, does it?

But as humiliations go, it ranks a good bit higher. Especially when the current FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, who’s quite friendly to the MAGA cause, had been making rather disgruntled noises about CBS’ broadcast license in the wake of that Harris interview edit — and that sure wasn’t a “buy” sign for the Skydance merger.

The fact that Skydance’s people, who are about to take over this flaming dungheap, were happy to divulge the bit about the free spots for conservative PSAs on their unused airtime is a bit of a giveaway of what’s coming.

And an indication of just how many of the denizens of that newsroom will avoid the professional Grim Reaper when the new management gets off the elevator.

Margaret Brennan, call your agent. Scott Pelley, well… maybe don’t bother.

They’ve already started running off execs at CBS News. Wendy McMahon, who’d been the president there, already got her pink slip.

It’s not so much a question of whether the Skydance merger will flip CBS News from blue to red. With the independent media barbarians storming the gates of the legacy corporate press’ dominance of the journalistic space, the real question is whether there will even be a CBS News, at least as it’s currently understood.

Or, given CBS News’ demonstrated ethics or lack thereof, whether anybody would miss them.

What Skydance has proven is they’re pretty immune to the woke mind virus and they’re not all that committed to doing things the way they’ve always been done. These are the guys who up and decided to resurrect the Top Gun franchise and went out and made a billion dollars on a sequel when nobody else in Hollywood seems to be able to break even on those. Not to mention Skydance is the fountain from which the Mission: Impossible movies, which are about as conservative a set of flicks as the 21st century is capable of housing, come from.

So when they say, “Sure, we’ll air $10-15 million worth of Trumpy PSA’s to help pay off that settlement,” you’re entitled to believe that could be indicative of lots more things Liz Warren won’t like.

And she might be a clown, but Liz Warren is at least smart enough to recognize this fact.

That’s why the Left, and what’s left of “Journalism,” old-style, are tearing their blouses over the settlement.

READ MORE:

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