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Late last night, Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, agreed to pay Donald Trump $16 million to settle the president’s lawsuit over the network’s editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election. This agreement comes six months after ABC paid $15 million to Trump’s foundation to end his suit over how George Stephanopoulos characterized the president’s sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll. Taken together, these settlements represent a troubling compromise of editorial independence for two of the standard-bearers of American broadcast journalism.
There was nothing out of the ordinary about how 60 Minutes edited its interview with Harris, and Stephanopoulos’s misstatement about the Carroll case was not substantive, making Trump’s suits against each network utterly meritless. Nevertheless, both Paramount and ABC’s corporate parent, Disney, agreed to pay up, largely out of a short-sighted bid to curry favor with the current administration.
Clayton Weimers, the head of Reporters Without Borders, called the Paramount settlement “shameful” in a statement that continued, “A line is being drawn between the owners of American news media who are willing to stand up for press freedom and those who capitulate to the demands of the president. Today, Paramount’s leaders chose to be on the wrong side of that dividing line, but they’d be mistaken to believe appeasing Trump today will stop his attacks in the future.”
Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said, “Calling these ‘settlements’ doesn’t quite capture what’s happening. It’s more like surrender—or even payoff.”
The aim of ABC’s settlement seemed to be about paving the way for a smoother relationship with the president during his second term, with an anonymous network executive telling CNN’s Brian Stelter that “this problem needed to go away.” For Paramount, the incentive appears to be financial: the media conglomerate is in the midst of an $8 billion merger with the film studio Skydance that is awaiting approval from the FCC. Last year, the chair of that agency, Brendan Carr, told Fox News that “the news distortion complaint over the 60 Minutes transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.”
“This is different from the ABC case in the sense that there is a clearer sort of quid pro quo,” says Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “There’s this merger that Paramount wants to happen, FCC approval is very much needed, and Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, is an absolute political stooge and bootlicker. And I say that because he wears a golden bust of Donald Trump as a lapel pin.”
In May, the appearance that the FCC was holding up the Paramount-Skydance merger because of Trump’s suit against CBS led senators Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders to send a letter to Paramount CEO Shari Redstone cautioning her that “Under the federal bribery statute, it is illegal to corruptly give anything of value to public officials to influence an official act.” Paramount did not respond to that letter. After the apparent quid pro quo was made official, Senator Wyden doubled down on Bluesky, writing, “Paramount just paid Trump a bribe for merger approval. When Democrats retake power, I’ll be first in line calling for federal charges. In the meantime, state prosecutors should make the corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court, today.”
While a prosecutor in Delaware—the state where Paramount is incorporated—is unlikely to pursue such a charge, the company now faces a different legal challenge. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, a shareholder in Paramount, is considering filing a suit against Redstone and the rest of the company’s board alleging that they violated their fiduciary duty to the company’s shareholders by facilitating an illegal bribe. “We feel that the decision that was made to settle this patently unconstitutional lawsuit is an insult to the journalists of CBS, to the journalists of 60 Minutes, and it’s an invitation to Trump to continue targeting other news outlets,” said Brenna Frey, a lawyer representing the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
If successful, this suit would force Paramount’s directors to pay damages to the company itself, though it faces an uncertain future in a Delaware court system that generally defers to corporate leaders. Ann Lipton, a business law scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder, described the suit as “something of a Hail Mary.” Christine Sautter, from Southern Methodist University, agreed that “it is definitely an uphill battle.” Still, she continued, “I think you have to try. If you don’t try, you never know.”
Using this sort of litigation as a means of enforcing journalistic standards on Paramount is only a plausible strategy because of the consolidation of the broadcast news media into a handful of sprawling corporations. With Redstone and the rest of Paramount’s board poised to personally earn tens of millions of dollars from the merger with Skydance, the integrity of CBS News was hardly a consideration.
“I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this in the US,” says Jaffer. “Some people compare it to the McCarthy era, and I think there are similarities—especially in the bullying from official power and the institutional surrender. But McCarthy was just a senator.” Now it’s the president of the United States doing the bullying. ABC and CBS may have allowed themselves to be pushed around, but if the free press is to persevere through the Trump era, the rest of the media must refuse to follow their example.
(With additional reporting from Aida Alami.)
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