Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS News, said it has agreed to pay $16 million to President Trump’s foundation for his future presidential library to settle a lawsuit he filed over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris during last fall’s elections.
The settlement includes Paramount paying Trump’s legal fees, CBS News and other outlets reported. The settlement did not include an apology.
As part of the settlement, Paramount also agreed that 60 Minutes will release transcripts of interviews with presidential candidates in the future, although they may be redacted due to legal or national security concerns, CBS reported.
Legal observers spanning the ideological spectrum say Trump’s lawsuit spuriously alleges election interference over the kind of discretionary editorial choices that routinely confront broadcast journalists.
As a result, the settlement represents a bitter blow to CBS News and its crown jewel 60 Minutes — not for what it broadcast or reported, but for a deal struck by corporate executives many layers above them.
60 Minutes Executive Producer Bill Owens had told colleagues he would refuse to apologize. The chief executive of CBS News and its local stations, Wendy McMahon, had opposed settling.
Each ultimately resigned this spring, saying their departures would smooth a path for the program and the news division to continue independent-minded reporting. 60 Minutes is the longest running prime-time series in American television.
CBS’s legal team repeatedly made robust legal defenses even as attorneys for Paramount Global sought to strike a deal with the president’s private lawyers.
Yet Paramount’s controlling owner, Shari Redstone, has billions of dollars at stake as she seeks to close a sale of the company to Skydance Media. The deal is under formal review by the Federal Communications Commission, now led by Trump’s pick as chairman, Brendan Carr.
In the case, filed before a Trump-appointed federal judge in Eastern Texas, Trump’s legal team argued that CBS engaged in “unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive and substantial news distortion.”
“Am I supposed to take that seriously?” asks University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias, who specializes in First Amendment issues. “I do not understand how suits that are arguably frivolous or meritless — that have very little substance and wouldn’t amount to large judgment if you went to trial — are then settled for millions of dollars.”
“It’s laughable and it’s an affront to the First Amendment,” Northwestern University law professor Heidi Kitrosser says of Trump’s case. “His concern first and foremost is to intimidate the press.”
CBS and Paramount are far from alone in seeking to make peace with Trump. ABC News’s parent company, the Walt Disney Co., paid $15 million to a future foundation and museum for Trump to settle a lawsuit over incorrect remarks by anchor George Stephanopoulos, who said Trump had been found liable for rape in a civil suit. He hadn’t; A New York City jury rejected that count but found Trump liable for sexual assault.
Elsewhere, Meta paid $25 million to resolve a suit from Trump over his removal from Facebook after the January 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol.
Disney’s attorneys feared they could lose if the case went to trial, though media lawyers said it was likely to prevail on the merits. Meta had an even stronger case, outside lawyers say.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X paid $10 million to settle still another Trump lawsuit. All these corporations have major business interests that can be regulated by government officials. In Musk’s case, his SpaceX also has contracts with the federal government worth billions of dollars.
The FCC is reviewing the acquisition of Paramount by Skydance because it entails the transfer of Paramount’s licenses to use the public airwaves for its 27 local television stations.
“I think that they believe they’re buying peace,” Kitrosser says, pointing to the confluence of the legal settlement of Trump’s private litigation and the federal review by his regulators. “That’s part of what’s going on: this is protection money.”
Skydance Media CEO David Ellison is the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose billions are underwriting the deal for Paramount. Trump has hosted the tech titan at the White House and considers him a friend.
In mid-June, after seeing David Ellison at an ultimate fighting match in Newark, N.J., Trump praised the Skydance chief and said he hoped the deal would be approved. “Ellison’s great. He’ll do a great job with it.”
The litigation filed by Trump tangled up any such approval by the FCC, however.
Indeed, FCC Chairperson Carr gave ballast to Trump’s suit by requesting CBS share raw footage and full transcripts of the 60 Minutes interview with Harris, which was one of Trump’s demands. Carr did so after reviving a complaint against CBS that had been filed by a conservative public interest group. Carr’s Democratic predecessor had dismissed the complaint in her final days in office.
CBS had previously refused to release the raw materials, citing the importance of maintaining journalistic independence from governmental interference.
Shortly after Carr’s request, CBS announced it was legally required to comply, though the network has challenged the agency’s requests and demands in the past. (One such appeal, over a complaint filed by the late former President Jimmy Carter, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981.)
After receiving the unedited material, the FCC publicly posted links to it and CBS swiftly followed suit. The network also published a statement that said the material showed there had been no bias in how they presented the Harris interview. Carr said he would keep a review open for six weeks to allow the public to weigh in.
Carr told Fox News that day that an investigation was warranted under “news distortion” concerns because CBS broadcast different answers on two different programs to the same question. “The [FCC] policy says you can’t, you know, swap answers out to make it look like somebody said something entirely different,” Carr said. “Clearly, the words of the answers were very different.”
The transcripts appear to show that CBS editors pulled from slightly different points in the same response, with Harris speaking vaguely as she attempted to sidestep controversy over the incendiary issue of the Israel-Hamas.
After the transcript’s release, Trump denounced CBS. “CBS should lose its license, and the cheaters at 60 Minutes should all be thrown out, and this disreputable ‘NEWS’ show should be immediately terminated,” Trump posted online. (CBS as a network doesn’t hold a license; the local stations on which it is broadcast do.)
“That’s not a veiled threat — it’s an open threat,” Tobias says of Trump’s remarks. “Look at what’s already poured in — millions into his coffers [from media companies].”
Tobias puts the settlement in the context of the FCC’s new agenda under Carr, with agency reviews of programming on ABC, CBS and NBC. Carr has also ordered a formal investigation into whether corporate underwriting spots aired by NPR and PBS have evolved into full-fledged commercials and says he believes Congress should eliminate funding for the public broadcasters. (The two networks say they take pains to abide by federal law and the FCC’s own guidance.)
Some of the network’s stars had openly lobbied Paramount not to settle. Others were anticipating it with a sense of mourning. Tobias suggested they didn’t stand a chance.
Carr “is leveraging Trump’s power and the whole force of the government to come down on major aspects of the press,” Tobias said. “Who’s going to stand up to Trump? Nobody. Certainly not the Congress — not the Senate or the House. So you’ve got the press.
“But now the press, you’re seeing them operating on their own interests. And they’re settling these cases that are not very strong on the merits.”
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