Paramount Reportedly Ready to Pay Off Trump Lawsuits to Get Merger Approval

It appears that once again, a major company is capitulating and making concessions to President Trump in order to curry his favor. The New York Times reports that Paramount, the owner of CBS News, is looking to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that he alleges was misleadingly edited to make her look better in the run-up to the election.

The reported settlement talks come after both ABC News and Meta settled cases with Trump before going to trial. In the latter case, Meta on Thursday decided to pay the president $25 million in order to drop a case he filed over being banned from Facebook following the January 6th Capitol riots. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been full-throated in his endorsement of President Trump since his election victory following an acrimonious relationship in his first term. Meta, coincidentally, is facing an antitrust trial in April seeking to unwind its acquisition of Instagram, a case that was filed by the Biden administration.

The lawsuit that President Trump filed against Paramount relies on an untested legal theory that CBS violated Texas law which prohibits deceptive trade practices in marketing to consumers. CBS promoted its interview with Harris on “Face the Nation” where she was shown giving a different answer from the one she gave in the full “60 Minutes” interview. CBS has said it aired a different portion of her answer during the promotional segment due to time constraints.

News outlets using their editorial judgment by editing an interview is standard practice and surely protected by the First Amendment—Harris’s answers were not distorted, CBS just slotted in a different answer she gave to the same question. The Times notes that CBS’s own lawyers believe Trump’s standing to file a lawsuit in Texas is “tenuous at best.”

Another bizarre aspect of this case is that President Trump’s lawyer Edward Paltzik, speaking to the Times, claims that ABC’s editing of the segment somehow harmed him, a claim which seems would be hard to stand up in court considering Trump won the White House: “Real accountability for CBS and Paramount will ensure that the president is compensated for the harm done to him, and will deter the Fake News from further distorting the facts to advance a partisan agenda. President Trump looks forward to seeing this case through to a just conclusion.”

President Trump has filed dozens of lawsuits against media outlets over the years, most of which he has ultimately lost. But he is vindictive and again has the power of the federal government in his hands. During his first administration, Trump’s Department of Justice attempted to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner unless CNN was sold off, some believe an attempt to weaken the broadcast channel. Ultimately the deal was able to proceed.

Paramount is trying to complete a merger with film studio Skydance, which would produce billions of dollars in proceeds for Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone. The Times reports she is supportive of reaching a settlement with President Trump, whose new FCC chairman has control over TV broadcast licenses and has already said he would investigate the CBS interview.

None of this should be surprising at this point. Major corporations are lining up to kiss the ring of President Trump in hopes that he will give them free reign to do whatever they would like without guardrails, or gain access to public funds and contracts, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been able to quickly collect after giving President Trump the opportunity to take credit for major deals that would have likely happened anyway. In the case of Paramount, it will certainly cause a lot of reputational damage to the news outlets being thrown under the bus. But Trump gets to claim victory against “woke media” and his supporters will eat it up. Redstone probably does not care very much about the reporters at CBS anyway. It is all just business, as they would say.