Paramount’s $16 Million Settlement With Trump Sends a Chilling Message

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Some good news for David Zaslav: As of this week, it seems there may be another entertainment executive who’s more widely loathed than the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO. Some bad news for the rest of us: The woman who’s taken that ignominious crown, Paramount Global owner Shari Redstone, has further endangered the United States’ already crumbling democracy in the process.

On Wednesday morning, Paramount’s co-CEO George Cheeks (yes, that’s his name) had the unenviable task of explaining to shareholders why the entertainment giant—which owns CBS, among several other prominent TV assets—had chosen to settle a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump over an October 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that, he’d baselessly claimed, had been edited to make her sound better. “Yes, the company has agreed in principle to settle the lawsuit, and as reported, it does not include an apology,” Cheeks huffed to the investors, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “Look, companies often settle litigation to avoid the high and somewhat unpredictable cost of legal defense, the risk of an adverse judgment that could result in significant financial as well as reputational damage, and the disruption to business operations.”

That’s a long way of saying: We chickened out so we could get a deal. The long-struggling Paramount has been hoping to get bought out for a while now—preferably by the production giant Skydance Media, known for IP blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick and Mission Impossible—The Final Reckoning. However, just when the deal seemed as good as ready, a Trump-size problem emerged. First, the then-candidate filed a $10 billion lawsuit the week before Election Day, nonsensically accusing Paramount-owned 60 Minutes of favorably editing opponent Kamala Harris’ “word salad” and thus conducting “a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.” (Observers of the Jan. 6 insurrection might have had some thoughts about that.) The allegation stemmed from an instance of seemingly differing answers offered to host Bill Whitaker in a preview clip aired on Face the Nation versus the final broadcast. CBS clarified that those Harris quotes had both been part of the answer to the same question, and that certain edits had been made for the sake of timing, per usual practice. The broadcaster soon published the full transcripts to back this fact up.

Nevertheless, even after Trump won reelection, he kept up his case against Paramount, with the help of his loyalists. Soon after the election results, Brendan Carr—then a Federal Communications Commission commissioner who was in line to head the agency under Trump—straight-up told Fox News that the Harris edit would be taken into consideration when regulators decided whether or not to approve the Skydance merger. Shortly after the inauguration, Trump announced a private sector A.I. initiative that involved Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison—who just so happens to be a long-favored friend of Trump’s, as well as the father of David Ellison, founder and CEO of Skydance Media. Last month, the younger Ellison joined the president ringside at a UFC event, where they were spotted conversing and shaking hands. Trump would later praise David in public while once again bringing up the 60 Minutes interview. (His thoughts on David as potential chief of Paramount and CBS: “He’ll do a great job with it.”) Also worth a mention: Larry himself will have voting control over the Skydance-Paramount behemoth, as a corporate investor in the $8 billion merger.

So, even though various First Amendment lawyers had deemed Trump’s case to be baseless and absurd (one told CNN that the case was “ridiculous junk”), the White House kept unsubtly hinting that Paramount’s future depended upon whether the company would make Carr, Trump, and the Ellisons happy. Paramount’s owners and executives appeared to get that message, and insider reporting throughout Trump’s term kept indicating that Shari Redstone, Mr. Cheeks, and their fellow stakeholders appeared willing to kowtow to the administration—instead of defending their employees and journalists. In fact, their only purported hesitation seemed to be the appearance of effectively bribing Trump by settling with him.

In May, multiple Democratic senators sent letters to Redstone urging her to retract any settlement offer and to “stand up for freedom of the press and our democracy.” Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who signed on to those letters, went further by threatening to summon Paramount executives “to explain their crimes in front of Congress and to the public when Democrats retake power.” (After the settlement was made official, Wyden outright called it a “bribe” and reiterated that “when Democrats retake power, I’ll be first in line calling for federal charges. In the meantime, state prosecutors should make the corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court, today.”) Lawmakers from the California state government likewise invited former CBS executives to testify in front of the state Senate.

Nevertheless, we’ve reached this settlement. Lisa Graves, president of the Center for Media and Democracy, told me in a statement that it’s part of a dispiriting pattern under Trump’s second term.

“The settlement seems designed in part to curry favor with Trump, who has wielded the power of the White House to subject companies and industries to what seem like shakedowns to get his way,” she said. “It comes in the wake of several major law firms caving to Trump. It also comes as Verizon obeyed with Trump’s authoritarian squeeze on industries by preemptively dropping its commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in its workplace.” (It should be noted: Paramount has admitted that the $16 million payout will serve to cover Trump’s legal fees, with the rest of the money acting as an in-kind donation to his future presidential library.)

And how have CBS and the 60 Minutes felt about all this, you ask? Well, pretty awful. In April, 60 Minutes executive Bill Owens—who’d worked with CBS since the late 1980s—resigned in protest of the proposed settlement; about a month later, CBS News president Wendy McMahon was forced out for her consistent objection to the settlement. Live on the air to its millions of regular viewers, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley took a few minutes of his April 27 episode to chide CBS’ parent company, stating that “Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways” and calling it out for “trying to complete a merger” with approval from the Trump administration.

Indeed, all of the show’s brand-name hosts sent a letter to the Paramount C-suite imploring Cheeks and his fellow execs to keep resisting Trump’s suit. Even non-CBS talent at Paramount registered their disapproval, as the creators of South Park (which remains one of the corporation’s most successful properties) alleged that Paramount and Skydance had messed with their contract even before the merger had been approved. While all accused have denied that characterization, the South Park guys are still shaking their fists, having declared the merger a “shitshow” just this week.

The angst inside Paramount and CBS has not calmed down, and likely will not anytime soon. Many 60 Minutes staffers are still frustrated that the company did not pursue what seemed like a very winnable case against Trump. The Writers Guild of America, East, which represents CBS News’ editorial union, said the parent company’s cop-out “threatens journalists’ ability to do their job reporting on powerful public figures.” On Wednesday, CBS Evening News co-anchor (and Slate Political Gabfest co-host) John Dickerson asked his viewers on air, “The Paramount settlement poses a new obstacle: Can you hold power to account after paying it millions? Can an audience trust you when it thinks you’ve traded away that trust?”

Meanwhile, Trumpist media outlets have reacted just as you’d expect, with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire declaring, falsely, that the president’s lawsuit had “exposed” a “deceptively edited Kamala interview,” and the American Spectator pointing out, correctly, that this result is “humiliating” for CBS. (One reliably conservative outfit that did not take glee in this outcome: the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which labeled this outcome a “worrying precedent” for American media.) Plenty of aggrieved liberals and press advocates also took to social media to announce the immediate cancellation of their Paramount+ subscriptions.

Paul Goodman, a legal counsel at the Center for Accessible Technology who’s been agitating against Verizon’s DEI capitulation to the FCC, was one of those Paramount+ quitters. “For Paramount, it seems like they’re commodifying First Amendment rights—the First Amendment has a price on it, and that price is getting a merger,” he told me in an interview. “It makes me think of that quote attributed to Ben Franklin: ‘Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ ”

If Paramount investors seem inclined to rush to that safety, it’s not least because the iconic entertainment brand has been run rather poorly. Rounds upon rounds of layoffs, cuts to programming, investment in a streaming service that everyone hates, Zaslav-level bungling of iconic brands, a rock-bottom crash in stock value post-pandemic, sweeping back-catalog scrubbing that’s pissed off the many celebrities who’ve done shows and movies under Paramount—this chaos is what has defined the executives, instead of any measurable business successes. For that reason, as Goodman noted to me and as my colleague Alex Kirshner has explained, it makes sense from a pure biz standpoint to do anything that could improve Paramount’s corporate health, including an expedited merger.

But there’s more trouble ahead for Paramount, even with its Skydance savior. Sen. Elizabeth Warren joined her colleague Wyden’s call for “a full investigation into whether or not any anti-bribery laws were broken.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation—which owns some shares of Paramount—has threatened to sue Redstone and the company over the settlement. The very liberals who form the audience for Paramount’s most popular shows, like 60 Minutes and The Daily Show, are likely to boycott the whole enterprise as fervently as they have, say, the now-struggling Washington Post. And this entire “shitshow” is likely to define the legacies of Shari Redstone, George Cheeks, Father and Son Ellison, and all their business partners as our bedrocks of democracy crumble under Donald Trump. At least they got some cash out of it.