President Donald J. Trump’s ongoing lawsuit with CBS continues, and the network must be sweating bullets as they’re reportedly planning to settle the dispute. The network had a shambolic interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the waning days of the 2024 election. It was a train wreck. Upon further review, it was even more of a disaster, with segments being deceptively edited to make the 2024 Democratic nominee sound less of a dolt.
The evidence is there, and Trump filed a $10 billion suit. It’s election interference, though it also shows how bad of a candidate Kamala was since, even after editing her atrocious interviews, she still sounded incompetent. Some viewed the lawsuit as far-fetched. Executives at CBS’ parent company, Paramount, are willing to settle (via NYT):
When Donald J. Trump sued CBS for $10 billion days before the 2024 election, accusing the company of deceptively editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, many legal experts dismissed the litigation as a far-fetched attempt to punish an out-of-favor news outlet.
Now Mr. Trump is back in the White House, and many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.
Settlement discussions between representatives of Paramount and Mr. Trump are now underway, according to three people with knowledge of the talks. There is no assurance, though, that they will result in a deal, and it is unclear what the terms of any such deal might include.
Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, strongly supports the effort to settle, according to two people with knowledge of her thinking. Ms. Redstone stands to clear billions of dollars on the sale of Paramount, the media empire founded by her father Sumner Redstone, in a deal with Skydance, an entertainment company backed by the billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son David.
A settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation.
Walter Cronkite saw this coming.