How Trump’s media war brought Paramount to its knees

The breaking point came on a Saturday night in the middle of May. CBS President George Cheeks called news division chief Wendy McMahon with a suggestion: “It’s probably time.”

Two days later, McMahon announced her departure.

The forced resignation marked a turning point: The network of Edward R. Murrow, which stood against McCarthyism and once defined American broadcast journalism, was capitulating to White House pressure as its corporate owner sought approval for a lucrative merger.

The cascading effects of President Donald Trump’s decade-long war on the media had helped topple McMahon, as her corporate bosses struggled to navigate how to respond to a lawsuit from a president who had fundamentally reshaped the relationship between the press and power in America.

“It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward,” McMahon wrote to her staff. Just weeks before, Bill Owens, the top producer at the news division’s prized “60 Minutes,” had resigned.

On Tuesday, CBS’s parent company agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit over the network’s editing of a campaign interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The deal makes Paramount, which is attempting to complete an $8 billion sale to Skydance Media, the latest company to pay millions of dollars to Trump-aligned entities to avoid punitive government action.

The money, minus plaintiffs’ fees and costs, will go to Trump’s presidential library. Paramount said neither Trump nor a separate plaintiff in the case, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), will receive funds directly or indirectly from the company.

The company agreed that in the future, “60 Minutes” will release transcripts of interviews with U.S. presidential candidates after their interviews have aired.

The settlement, suggested by the professional mediator overseeing the discussions, does not include an apology.

The arrangement illustrates how a major media institution gave in to pressure from the president to protect the business interests of its controlling shareholder and avoid what could have become an extended confrontation. In the first five months of his second term in the White House, Trump has forced similar concessions from universities; Disney, which owns ABC News; social media giants and several top law firms.

The ultimate outcome for Paramount remains uncertain, with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s investigation into CBS News coverage still ongoing and no guarantee that regulatory pressure will subside, even if CBS capitulates to Trump’s demands.

The amount of the settlement is the same as Disney paid to settle Trump’s lawsuit against ABC News. Board members at Paramount were loath to pay more than ABC, partly because they were concerned that to do so might open them up to shareholder lawsuits or allegations of bribery. CBS’s coverage did not involve any factual errors, and lawyers almost universally deemed the legal case unlikely to succeed.

But the months it would have taken to litigate risked bogging down Paramount’s proposed deal with Skydance, which David Ellison, the son of tech billionaire and Trump ally Larry Ellison, controls.

Cheeks defended the settlement on a call with shareholders Wednesday morning, casting such agreements as a common corporate action to “avoid the high and somewhat unpredictable cost of legal defense,” the risk of “being mired in uncertainty and distraction.”

Tom Cibrowski, president of CBS News, thanked employees on Wednesday for “blocking out the noise” from the case, according to a recording of the network’s morning editorial meeting obtained by The Washington Post. “I know the past few months have been very tough and difficult and this has been a major distraction,” he said, urging employees to lock arms and continue their work.

Throughout the litigation and negotiations, Trump delivered steady attacks on the media and “60 Minutes.” Paramount responded by exerting extraordinary scrutiny over how its news organization covered the administration.

Lawyers for both Paramount and Trump were facing a court deadline that would have compelled the parties to begin exchanging internal documents for discovery, according to two people familiar with the discussions, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential conversations. Paramount also planned to make significant changes to its board Wednesday, which could have complicated a sensitive settlement negotiation.

Lawyers worked over the weekend to reach a deal and finally clinched it late Tuesday, these people said.

“With this record settlement, President Donald Trump delivers another win for the American people as he, once again, holds the Fake News media accountable for their wrongdoing and deceit,” said a spokesman for Trump’s legal team.

What began in early October with a promotional clip for a “60 Minutes” episode spiraled into an oppressive environment for newsgathering at CBS News, according to more than 10 staffers at CBS and Paramount, in addition to outside bankers, lawyers, Trump advisers and other media executives, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive deliberations.

Origins of the CBS case

Trump sued CBS in a Texas court in late October and alleged that the network harmed his election by deceptively editing two separate versions of an answer given by Harris during an interview on “60 Minutes.” The newsmagazine show traditionally invites both presidential nominees for an interview. Harris agreed, but Trump declined.

Harris was interviewed on Saturday, Oct. 5, and “60 Minutes” staffers scrambled to edit and prepare the episode so it could be ready to air Monday evening. (The usual Sunday broadcast was pre-empted that weekend for the American Music Awards.) Staffers worked through Saturday night and all day Sunday, continuing into Sunday evening.

Normally, a promotional clip would be pulled from the finished interview show, but time was short. When CBS’s Sunday morning show, “Face the Nation,” wanted to use a clip to promote the Harris interview, “60 Minutes” approved the first part of her response, and later selected a different, more succinct section of her answer for the next day’s show. Such editing decisions are common, especially when condensing a lengthy interview into a 20-minute television segment.

But in the fevered weeks before the presidential election, Trump and his supporters saw a sinister plot — arguing that CBS had deceptively edited the interview to make Harris appear more coherent.

Soon after the episode aired, Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, a right-leaning public-interest law firm, filed a complaint with the FCC. CBS’s editing “pulled back the curtain on what conservatives believed all along, that they were slicing and dicing answers to make certain people look a certain way,” Suhr said in an interview.

Trump said the editing amounted “to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election” and claimed that it violated a Texas consumer protection law intended to shield consumers from false advertising and misleading practices.

Trump won the presidential election in November, undercutting the notion that CBS had harmed him. But by then, he had repeatedly declared his intention to retaliate against media organizations. “The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country,” Trump posted in September on Truth Social, the social media platform he founded.

Trump’s war on the press

In the two months before the presidential election, Trump attacked the media more than 100 times in public speeches or other remarks. The week before Election Day, Trump threatened to sue the New York Times, and his campaign lodged a Federal Election Commission complaint against The Washington Post. He demanded equal time from NBC after the network featured Harris on “Saturday Night Live” the week before the election.

In mid-December, ABC News stunned legal experts by agreeing to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential foundation to settle a defamation lawsuit with him, along with $1 million in legal fees and a note of regret.

Shortly after the settlement, the new president-elect declared that he had to continue to go after the “very corrupt” press. “It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press,” he said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.

“We knew going into this election that we could not let the press do what they had done the first term,” said a Trump aide involved in the legal campaign. “We had to fight in the courts and put the media on their back feet.”

Shari Redstone, Paramount’s chair and controlling shareholder, was increasingly weighing in, through Cheeks, on the news output of CBS and “60 Minutes.” In January, she had objected to CBS executives about a “60 Minutes” segment on Israel’s war in Gaza, a point of particular interest for her, and a day later, the company appointed Susan Zirinsky, the former president of CBS News who is close to Redstone, to a new role overseeing standards at the news division.

In that role, Zirinsky reviewed “60 Minutes” segments that she deemed sensitive before they aired. Those segments were often politically oriented and inevitably involved the president, who dominates the news cycle. Producer Owens chafed at the additional supervision and the lack of trust it seemed to signal.

MAGA celebrates

As Paramount and CBS executives strategized about how to resolve their standoff with the president-elect, MAGA acolytes reveled in their wins.

“One brilliant legal strategy after the other — I know it’s brilliant because George Stephanopoulos is paying $15 million!” Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, said at a Manhattan gala in December, drawing cheers and applause as he criticized the ABC News host and toasted Trump’s legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn. “Boris, I will never know how you pulled that off. I don’t know if I want to ask.”

Trump, whose business career was littered with unsuccessful lawsuits, was on a streak.

Meta agreed in late January to pay him $25 million to resolve a 2021 lawsuit, with $22 million going directly to Trump’s presidential library and the remainder covering legal fees and payments to other plaintiffs.

Elon Musk’s X settled with Trump in February for $10 million over a decision by its previous incarnation, Twitter, to ban him from the platform over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The FCC’s Carr demanded that CBS release the transcript and unedited footage of the Harris interview. CBS did so in February, maintaining that it edited and presented the interview in line with industry standards.

Redstone and CBS executives told associates that a settlement could put the dispute behind the company as the merger approval process loomed.

The deal requires FCC approval, and while the FCC chair is traditionally an independent role, Carr wears a gold pin of Trump’s face on his lapel and has talked glowingly of the president and his agenda. “He is the first FCC chair who has defined his job as doing the president’s bidding,” said Blair Levin, who served as chief of staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt in the 1990s.

Carr did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pressure from the left

But Paramount was also receiving warnings that Trump’s lawsuit was not the only danger ahead. Lawyers had briefed the board in March that, given the weakness of the Trump legal case, the company could be on the hook with shareholders unhappy with the company paying a president over a frivolous claim. “The lawyers really scared the board members,” said one person involved in the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about confidential discussions.

Paramount filed a motion in March requesting dismissal of Trump’s suit, which the company said was “an affront to the First Amendment” that was “without basis in law or fact.”

Internally, CBS was adamant the company not have to pay more than ABC News, given that ABC’s Stephanopoulos had incorrectly said Trump was found liable for rape, rather than sexual abuse, in a civil suit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.

But Trump’s suit — which initially asked for damages of $10 billion and, later, $20 billion — was so far beyond the scope of a reasonable figure that the negotiations, even with a professional mediator, dragged on for months.

This spring, the two sides discussed CBS airing a number of public service announcements as a way to come to terms, but distance between them persisted. (Tuesday’s settlement did not include language about such announcements, but Trump’s team anticipates that the new Paramount might be more open to such a campaign.) Trump’s lawyers were requesting $25 million, and then close to $50 million, while CBS hovered around $15 million.

In April, the president took aim at “60 Minutes” over its reporting on Ukraine and Greenland, and said the network should lose its license. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Executives at Paramount and CBS took note of Trump’s complaints, which only served to heighten tension inside the organization.

Prominent lawmakers on the left mounted an effort to apply pressure from the other direction. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Paramount expressing “serious concern” that the company might be “engaging in improper conduct involving the Trump Administration in exchange for approval of its megamerger with Skydance Media.”

The senators’ letter suggested that any settlement could violate bribery laws, noting that “it is illegal to corruptly give anything of value to public officials to influence an official act. If Paramount officials make these concessions in a quid pro quo arrangement to influence President Trump or other Administration officials, they may be breaking” federal law.

“Paramount appears to be attempting to appease the administration to secure merger approval,” the senators wrote.

The senators had previously joined six colleagues in a May 6 letter urging Redstone not to settle the lawsuit, calling it “an attack on the United States Constitution and the First Amendment.”

“This pattern of corporations sacrificing their journalists and news divisions to make Trump happy is just horrifying,” Wyden told The Post. The CBS settlement, he said, “looks like just a pure and simple sellout.”

At least one Paramount shareholder has threatened to file a lawsuit against the company’s board of directors over the settlement. Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, sent a letter to Redstone on May 23 putting her on notice of pending litigation and requesting that she preserve all communications related to a potential agreement with Trump.

“It’s not a comfortable situation for us to be sending a legal letter to a company that operates a news outlet, but we’re here to protect the rights of journalists, not to protect Shari Redstone,” Stern told The Post.

Democrats in the California Senate launched their own probe, an unusual instance of state-level oversight of media industry decisions.

The senators and Stern did not receive responses from Redstone.

And the company bosses appeared to agree with Trump that he held the cards.

One of the final confrontations that McMahon, soon to be out as head of the news division, had with CBS executives came in May. Cheeks, the president of the network, had taken what McMahon perceived as unusual interest in a “60 Minutes” segment on Trump’s efforts to pressure law firms that had opposed him in court.

McMahon refused suggestions she saw as intrusions, including one that she preempt the episode with live programming. It ultimately ran as scheduled, in full.

But the bigger battle seemed lost. Media tycoons who had once opposed the president were renewing ties and shifting editorial policies. Companies were opting for financial settlements over editorial battles, even when they believed they could prevail in court.

Many, like CBS, had financial incentives that went beyond their news divisions.

In June, when asked about the state of the Paramount deal, Trump told reporters that David Ellison, who would lead the joint company, would do a great job. Many observers took that as a sign that Trump anticipates that the deal will go through.