Paramount Settles Trump’s ‘60 Minutes’ Suit for $16 Million (1)

Paramount Global reached a settlement with President Donald Trump over a lawsuit that alleged election interference by the company’s CBS news network when it showed two different versions of a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in October.

Paramount agreed to pay $16 million, including plaintiff’s fees, according to a statement from the company. What’s left will go to a future presidential library. Trump had sought damages of $20 billion. No money will be paid to him directly.

The settlement doesn’t include an apology. The network has agreed to release transcripts of presidential candidate interviews in the future. Although officially unrelated, the settlement is widely viewed as critical for Paramount to gain approval from federal regulators for its pending merger with Skydance Media.

Paramount co-Chief Executive Officer George Cheeks said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday that they chose to settle to avoid high, unpredictable legal costs and disruption to the business. An official from Trump’s legal team called the settlement a win and said that the settlement reflected the strength of the case in their favor.

WATCH: Paramount Global reached a settlement with President Donald Trump, agreeing to pay $16 million, including plaintiff’s fees, over a lawsuit that alleged election interference by the company’s CBS news network. Hannah Miller reports.

Source: Bloomberg

Read More: Behind the ‘60 Minutes’ Upheaval, a Big Merger Seeking Approval

Last fall, CBS aired a preview of Harris’s 60 Minutes interview during its Face the Nation news program. The clip featured Harris answering a question about the relationship between the US and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A later 60 Minutes episode aired an edited version of Harris’s response.

Trump, who had backed out of his own 60 Minutes interview, alleged in a court filing that the Harris response was “doctored to confuse, deceive, and mislead the American People in order to try and interfere in the election” and that the edit made her appear less incoherent. CBS said in a statement in response to the suit that Face the Nation had used a longer cut of Harris’s answer than 60 Minutes.

“When we edit any interview, whether a politician, an athlete, or movie star, we strive to be clear, accurate and on point,” CBS said in response. “The portion of her answer on 60 Minutes was more succinct, which allows time for other subjects in a wide ranging 21-minute-long segment.”

CBS had been fighting the litigation on multiple fronts, contending that Trump improperly filed it in a federal court in Texas and that the complaint was without merit.

The network’s lawyers argued that the Texas consumer protection law that Trump sued under was designed to protect “consumers engaged in commercial transactions against false, misleading, and deceptive business practices, not to police editorial decisions made by news organizations with which one disagrees.” US Representative Ronny Jackson, a Republican from Texas, was added to the suit in February as a co-plaintiff.

Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, announced in April that he was leaving the show, citing a lack of editorial independence. Scott Pelley, one of the show’s correspondents, addressed Owens’ departure on the air saying “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways.”

Bloomberg reported that prior to Owens’ decision to step down, Paramount Global Chair Shari Redstone had reviewed a list of 60 Minutes’ planned stories about Trump and indicated which ones she thought were fair and which ones she thought were problematic, though the show didn’t make changes based on her feedback. Redstone and Paramount are trying to finalize a merger with independent film and TV studio Skydance in a deal that has faced regulatory scrutiny.

“This settlement is a cowardly capitulation by the corporate leaders of Paramount, and a fundamental betrayal of 60 Minutes and CBS News,” Rome Hartman, a veteran 60 Minutes producer who worked on the Harris segment, said in a statement to Bloomberg.

“The story that was the subject of this lawsuit was edited by the book and in accordance with CBS News standards,” he said. “Our corporate bosses know that; they know that this lawsuit is completely baseless. But they settled it in order to preserve Shari Redstone’s payday. That is shameful.”

Trump reached a settlement with Walt Disney Co.’s ABC in December where the TV network agreed to give $15 million to Trump’s future presidential foundation or museum. Trump alleged that ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos defamed him when he said during a March 10, 2024 interview that Trump had been found “liable for rape.” A jury found Trump civilly liable in May 2023 for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll in the mid-90s and that Trump had defamed her by accusing her of lying to sell a book.

Meta Platforms Inc. agreed to pay $25 million to settle a 2021 Trump suit over the suspension of his social media accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, according to the Washington Post. Meta had said at the time that Trump violated its rules against inciting violence.

In light of the settlements, critics have argued that news networks and tech companies are kowtowing to Trump in order to preserve access to the White House and protect against retribution. Brendan Carr, who Trump appointed as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has said he’d probe CBS’s editing of the interview in the context of the Skydance-Paramount merger.

Carr has also revived FCC investigations into whether CBS, ABC, and Comcast Corp.’s NBC are politically biased and begun a probe into whether commercials aired on public broadcasters NPR and PBS violate federal law. Trump still has lawsuits against the Des Moines Register, book publisher Simon & Schuster and the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes.

Read More: ABC Settles Trump Defamation Case With a $15 Million Donation

(Adds Paramount executive comments in fourth paragraph. An earlier version of this story was corrected to clarify the timing of ABC interview and jury finding Trump liable.)

To contact the reporters on this story:
Hannah Miller in New York at hmiller129@bloomberg.net;
Zoe Tillman in Washington at ztillman2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Christopher Palmeri at cpalmeri1@bloomberg.net

Peter Blumberg

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