News broke overnight that the legal battle between CBS and Donald Trump over a deceptive broadcast from its highly-touted news program has come to an agreed-upon conclusion, and CBS News is fully shamed in the process. Beyond a significant penalty to be paid out, the news division is also facing a number of public revisions to its editorial practices. This is a major news division being swatted in the snout with a rolled up newspaper for befouling journalism.
It has been a long-simmering legal sparring match between President Trump and Paramount Global-CBS, one that has led to internal acrimony within the network and has impacted an ongoing corporate merger. Stemming from the “60 Minutes” broadcast last October, just before the general election, the heart of this case involved the deceptively edited interview with then candidate Kamala Harris.
As parent company Paramount is vying to complete a massive merger deal with Skydance Media things have stalled as this lawsuit over campaign tampering has affected that deal and had implications on government regulators approving the deal. Paramount has been pushing to close this affair and has been leaning on the news division - and the “60 Minutes” production specifically - to knuckle under and apologize. That has led to pushback from that production (including Scott Pelley scorching the parent company in one episode) and the pressure was significant enough that a longtime managing editor for the show and the CEO of the news division resigned their positions within weeks of each other.
Eager to end things, Paramount-CBS made an initial settlement offer of $15 million, which was rebuffed by President Trump. Recently, an arbitration decision boosted that sum to $20 million, but this too was not accepted, as Trump appeared to be more interested in the apology side of things. Now the details are emerging and it is bad for the CBS side.
Two payments are in play, with an initial sum of $16 million going to Trump for legal fees, other case-related expenses, and the rest going towards Trump’s presidential library fund. The second amount is not finalized but is said to be applied to CBS News practices, “set aside for advertisements, public service announcements, or other similar transmissions,” according to Fox News, speaking with Trump’s representatives. Paramount Global has denied this to be the case.
Additionally, there is a stipulation that is to be put in place that any future presidential interviews will be followed up with the release of a full transcript as well as the complete unedited video of the interviews. This becomes a complete humiliation for the news division, and that is seen in the attempt at recalibrating what all of this means from the statements made by the network.
"The settlement does not include a statement of apology or regret. The Company has agreed that in the future, 60 Minutes will release transcripts of interviews with eligible U.S. presidential candidates after such interviews have aired, subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns.
The significance of this is seen in the way the network shielded its editing of the interview. The furor over this segment began when a teaser clip of the interview first was shown on the CBS Sunday morning news show. After it received a share of mockery on social media over Kamala Harris delivering word salad responses, the actual “60 Minutes” interview that played showed Harris delivering a different answer.
The explanation is her long-winded answer was meandering and risible so it had been clipped to clean up her commentary. It was revealed that a different segment of her response was shown at night. The network tried to explain that the interview had been edited due to time constraints, but this did not add up, as the morning preview clip was only two minutes roughly, and the primetime broadcast supplied far more time for broader responses, not less time.
Then CBS withheld from delivering the transcript of the October interview, as had been common practice, as well as the full unedited video. These only came to light in February following an FCC investigation, at which time the network complied and released to the agency the transcripts and video. The full video showed a number of pertinent questions asked by Bill Whitaker that never made it to the air, including one direct question about seeing four times the amount of illegal border crossings during the Biden years.
This may not be the end of the legal migraines for Paramount-CBS regarding this matter. In May, the group Freedom Of The Press Foundation released a statement expressing its opposition to the Trump lawsuit and calling for the company to refrain from making a payout. It has pledged that if CBS would be making a settlement the organization would sue the network over that decision.