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Paramount is willing to strike a deal to resolve Donald Trump’s $20bn lawsuit against CBS News, after the studio’s owner, Shari Redstone, grew “concerned” about the programme’s balance in recent months.
Paramount was prepared to settle Trump’s suit, which alleges CBS’s flagship 60 Minutes news programme defamed him by deceptively editing an interview with his political opponent Kamala Harris last year, said two people familiar with the matter.
Paramount’s board drew up financial terms for a potential settlement in an April 18 meeting, the people said. The possible settlement could be in the tens of millions of dollars, said one of the people. Lawyers for both sides were set to begin mediation on Wednesday.
CBS’s lawyers have said Trump’s lawsuit is baseless and some of its own journalists have decried the potential deal as a capitulation to the White House by one of the country’s best-known news groups.
The openness to a settlement comes after Redstone, the billionaire who controls Paramount, grew frustrated with the tone of some of CBS’s coverage in recent months, said a person familiar with her thinking.
“She has been concerned for a while now about the balance of CBS News,” said the person. Redstone, who has been involved with organisations fighting antisemitism following Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel, took issue with CBS’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war last year. She raised her criticisms at a conference in October.
Although Redstone has recused herself from the Paramount board’s deliberations over the settlement, she has favoured a deal. “We can’t just be at a standstill, we have to move something forward,” Redstone told the board, said a person familiar with the matter.
Redstone and her family are also in line to receive a billion-dollar payout if the Trump administration approves Paramount’s agreed merger with Hollywood studio Skydance. The president’s media regulator, Brendan Carr, has been reviewing the deal for several months.
Redstone was rattled after Trump lashed out at CBS’s 60 Minutes on April 13 after it broadcast stories about Ukraine and Greenland. She called CBS chief executive George Cheeks asking what other stories were being prepared, said a person familiar with the matter.
“She did not ask for edits to stories, all she asked is that they are fair and balanced,” said a person close to Redstone. “Her thinking was: ‘We’re in the eye of the storm now. He’s posting about pieces,’” the person added.
Journalists in CBS’s newsroom have taken Redstone’s moves as an example of a billionaire owner meddling in editorial strategy. Over the past year Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and pharma billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong have similarly angered the newsrooms at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, respectively.
60 Minutes’ top producer Bill Owens quit last week in protest at what he said was a loss of journalistic independence. In an unusual on-air rebuke, 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley ended Sunday’s broadcast by telling viewers Paramount had begun “to supervise our content in new ways” as it tried to complete a merger.
Paramount’s conundrum underscores the unusual power the US president has wielded over corporate America.
Carr denies the CBS lawsuit has affected his deliberation over Paramount’s Skydance deal. But Paramount executives believe the two processes are intertwined.
The saga has drawn criticism from journalists outside CBS, who say Paramount’s concession to Trump would do permanent damage to the news organisation.
“In capitulating [Redstone would be] damaging the value of the asset that she’s trying to sell, by basically telling the world that one of the most storied brands in news can be silenced, manipulated or humiliated when it’s expedient,” said Gabriel Kahn, a former Wall Street Journal editor who is now a professor at the University of Southern California.
60 Minutes has been a fixture of US living rooms since the 1970s and the home to journalistic legends such as Walter Cronkite. The programme still brings in 7mn viewers on Sunday evenings. It has continued to air extensive coverage of Trump’s administration in recent weeks.
“In journalism, the currency is trust,” Kahn said. “CBS News is one of the few places that still has been able to maintain a high level of trust and strong reputation [in the US].”
The New York Times previously reported details of Paramount’s plans and the April board meeting.
Trump last year sued ABC News after anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely said on-air that Trump had been found “liable for rape”. Disney, which owns ABC, in December paid $15mn to Trump’s presidential library to settle the defamation lawsuit.
Trump hit out at CBS again on Wednesday as mediation began.
“The case we have against 60 Minutes, CBS, and Paramount is a true WINNER. They cheated and defrauded the American People at levels never seen before in the Political Arena” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Additional reporting by Christopher Grimes
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