CBS staff alarmed by reports of settlement talks with Trump over ‘60 Minutes’ Harris interview
CNN
Journalists, including some at CBS News, are expressing alarm at reports that CBS parent company Paramount Global is trying to settle a legally dubious lawsuit lodged by President Donald Trump last fall.
Journalists, including some at CBS News, are expressing alarm at reports that CBS parent company Paramount Global is trying to settle a legally dubious lawsuit lodged by President Donald Trump last fall. Trump sued CBS after an October “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris – Trump’s opponent in the presidential campaign – included an edit that Trump said was unfairly favorable to Harris. Despite legal experts’ widespread assertion that CBS’ editorial judgment was protected by the First Amendment, The New York Times Thursday night reported that a settlement was in the works. That sparked outage in CBS’ newsroom. “Trump’s lawsuit was a joke, but if we settle, we become the laughingstock,” a CBS correspondent said on condition of anonymity. CBS in October called the suit meritless and said at the time “we will vigorously defend against it.” A Paramount spokesperson on Friday declined to comment. A lawyer for Trump, Edward Paltzik, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he told The Times that “real accountability for CBS and Paramount will ensure that the president is compensated for the harm done to him.” The Times noted that “a settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation.”
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels.