Paramount, the movie and television giant, just agreed to pay millions of dollars to Donald Trump’s presidential library, just as the Trump administration is considering whether to block or approve Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance, another film giant.
The payment to Trump’s library is part of a $17 million settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed accusing CBS News of election interference in its deceptive editing of an interview with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
The case against CBS seemed weak. “Election interference” is a poorly defined idea (mostly wielded by liberals upset about Trump’s victories). Also, CBS eventually released the entire uncut transcript and video of the interview, and the editing seemed totally within the bounds of editorial judgment and not much different from what liberal outlets normally do.
The weakness of the case makes the settlement with Trump look suspicious.
Innocent explanations are plausible, but given Trump’s transactional nature and his long record of quid-pro-quo deals, it would be irresponsible not to consider the corrupt explanation: Paramount is paying Trump to get its merger approved. Put another way: Trump is using his regulatory power to extract money from corporations.
The interview and the suit
Harris gave three interviews to CBS in October 2024, and CBS used the material for different products. The most visible product was 60 Minutes.
CBS reporter Bill Whitaker at one point asked Harris about the war between Hamas and Israel: “What can the U.S. do at this point to stop this from spinning out of control?”
60 Minutes viewers saw Harris reply:
“Well, let’s start with Oct. 7. Twelve hundred people were massacred, 250 hostages were taken, including Americans. Women were brutally raped. And as I said then, I maintain Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. This war has to end.”
It was direct, forceful, and succinct. It also wasn’t how Harris answered the question. The next day, in a CBS special on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, viewers got to see Harris’s actual answer, which used three times as many words and featured her typical word salad. At one point, she rambled, “And the work that we have to do is also pay attention to what is happening every day in the region, and put U.S. resources into everything we can do.”
Harris’s constant use of word salad and empty platitudes was one of her weaknesses, as it suggested she lacked both expertise and eloquence — that she was an empty suit. CBS’s edits obscured that weakness.
So Trump sued CBS for “election interference” and demanded CBS release the transcript. In his complaint, Trump alleged that “through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive, and mislead the public, and attempt to tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party.”
Trump asked for $20 billion in damages. This was an unprecedented step. Republicans usually just complain about media bias the way people complain about the weather. Trump decided to try to make CBS pay for its bias.
CBS’s bias
CBS, of course, is an extremely biased outlet that adopts left-wing views as its basic framework of reality and regularly abandons standards to help Democrats or advance liberal priorities.
Here are some lowlights of CBS’s political coverage from just the past five years:
In February 2020, after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said COVID may have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, CBS accused him of peddling “conspiracy theories” and brought in the Chinese government as the authority to dismiss the idea as “harmful” and “xenophobia.”
In April 2021, CBS’s 60 Minutes charged Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) with corruption, noting that the Publix chain of grocery stores, which had donated to DeSantis in the past, had a partnership with the state for distributing the COVID vaccine. Florida Democrats immediately came out and rebutted the story. Democrats, not DeSantis, had arranged the partnership. The Democratic mayor of Palm Beach said he told 60 Minutes that DeSantis had no role in the partnership, but the reporters ignored that fact and that their reporting was “intentionally false.”
CBS still stands by that DeSantis story.
To cope with Trump’s inauguration, Major Garrett at CBS brought on a vacuous partisan TikTok influencer to encourage Democrats to be meaner.
More recently, CBS launched a broad defense of censorship, attacking Vice President JD Vance for criticizing European censorship and then airing a glowing profile of European censorship.
It is standard for CBS to adopt liberals’ tendentious or contested framing on matters. CBS stories have used terms like “tampon tax” (there is no such thing). When former President Joe Biden called his plan to continue Trump’s pace of vaccination “ambitious,” CBS called it “ambitious.”
Storylines that are unhelpful to the Left are just omitted. Stories of left-wing violence are regularly ignored. When writing about a Chinese dissident persecuted for opposing the one-child policy and its forced sterilization and abortion, CBS went out of its way to avoid mentioning any of these matters.
CBS describes genital surgeries and cross-sex hormones as “gender-affirming care,” which is not merely a euphemism but a full-throated embrace of radical transgender ideology. It falsely describes bans on boys in girls sports as “bans on transgender athletes.”
So, is CBS a biased news source? Of course it is. Would the journalists and editors there try to swing an election in Harris’s favor? Surely. But when CBS released the uncut video and transcript, it didn’t show gross distortions. It showed what viewers already knew from the two different Hamas answers CBS aired back before the election:
Harris rambles, spewing vacuous phrases, and sometimes CBS producers edit her down to more intelligible snippets. This is the sort of thing print, television, and radio editors do all the time. The motivation can be biased, but it is often simply an effort to put out a more coherent product that viewers can follow.
The merger
CBS’s parent company is Paramount, which also owns the movie studio of the same name. In 2024, Paramount announced it planned to merge with Skydance, another media company. (Skydance is behind the latest Mission: Impossible movies, for instance.)
The Federal Communications Commission, shortly after the election, while Biden’s appointees were still in charge, announced it would review the proposed merger, which would include Skydance taking over control of 28 broadcast licenses for local CBS affiliates.
When Trump took office, he replaced Biden’s FCC chair, Jessica Rosenworcel, with Brendan Carr. At this point, the uncomfortable situation was clear: Trump was demanding billions of dollars from a company whose business plans the Trump administration had the power to sink.
The FCC hasn’t announced a decision yet, but analysts assume this $17 million settlement will clear the way for FCC approval.
PARAMOUNT SETTLES WITH TRUMP OVER ’60 MINUTES’ CONTROVERSY
There’s no direct evidence of corruption, but Trump’s entire style involves plenty of quid pro quo and fondness for quid-pro-quo politicians like New York City Mayor Eric Adams and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
A politician who cared about ethics and the appearance of impropriety would have dropped the suit against CBS after winning and when it was clear that his administration held such great power over the network.