CBS Caving on Trump Fraud Suit?

Hmmm. No wonder Scott Pelley and Bill Owens spent last week protesting internal accountability for the deceptive edits on 60 Minutes’ interview of Kamala Harris. It must have been worse than we thought.

What else are we to conclude from an alleged decision by Paramount’s board to settle Donald Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit? The New York Times reported on the development last night:

Lawyers for President Trump and Paramount, the parent of CBS News, are set to begin mediation on Wednesday over a lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that accuses “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview with his 2024 Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.

Legal experts have called the suit baseless and an easy victory for CBS. But Paramount is entering the talks prepared to make a deal.

If it were “baseless” and an “easy victory,” why settle? Paramount has an entire legal division, one presumes, which could handle a fight at least up to the litigation stage. The NYT attempts to answer that question:

Shari Redstone, the company’s controlling shareholder, has said she favors settling the case. She is set to receive a major payday in a pending sale of Paramount to a Hollywood studio, Skydance, that requires sign-off from the Trump administration. Any settlement would ultimately require the board’s approval, and Ms. Redstone has told the board that she is recusing herself from deliberations related to the lawsuit.

Well, maybe, but that seems like a stretch. Yes, the Federal Trade Commission and/or the Federal Communications Commission could throw sand in the gears of the sale, yet another in the massive consolidation of studios in Hollywood over the last few decades. However, Paramount could fight and win that battle in court too, and it’s not even clear whether the FTC would bother. They have their hands full with Google and Facebook at the moment. And the latter demonstrates how little one gets from sucking up to Trump. 

Moreover, this should be an easy victory, although the Sullivan exception may not apply. The lawsuit rests on a claim of fraud that resulted in damage to viewers (in Texas, specifically, where the case would be heard) rather than defamation. That means CBS and its parent Paramount would have to argue that their segment with Harris didn’t get fraudulently manipulated to make her look, well, coherent. 

The Los Angeles Times thinks that CBS can win that argument:

Paramount’s lawyers have pushed back against Trump’s arguments and CBS journalists have maintained they did not distort the Harris interview. The raw footage shows she was quoted accurately, although CBS had edited her response by using her most cogent sentence.

CBS has said the edits were made to pare the then-vice president’s interview to a broadcast length.

Color me skeptical on this claim. If that were the case, then Paramount would go to the mattresses; as I argued before, they have plenty of in-house resources to do so. I suspect that Paramount’s attorneys looked at the raw footage and all of the correspondence and documentation around this event and came to a different conclusion. At the very least, the difference between the teaser of the interview that CBS ran previous to the broadcast and the sequence in the full broadcast makes it clear that some manipulation took place, likely after the teaser drew all sorts of criticism for Harris. Remember this? 

Remember Kamala’s word salad answer about Israel on 60 Minutes? It’s gone.

This is what many Americans will now see. pic.twitter.com/H4w7btDv6x

— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 8, 2024

That may be why Paramount is trying to settle the case now, rather than wait for the discovery process to begin and give Trump and his team a lot of ammunition for public attacks on CBS’ news division. 

As for claims of “independence” from 60 Minutes, that’s risible in light of their decades of narrative manipulation. They have been cooking stories longer than some of our readers have been alive, as I once recounted when given the honor of writing a foreword to Bernie Goldberg’s seminal book Bias. They’re now sore because of the accountability for their performance that has come their way.