$16 million, no apology: Paramount settles Trump’s ’60 minutes’ lawsuit

“Each settlement weakens the democratic freedoms on which these media organisations depend,” wrote Jameel Jaffer, head of the Knight First Amendment Institute. “They create precedents… that will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits.”

Paramount’s settlement, which includes Trump’s legal fees, comes with no apology. But it does include one unprecedented concession: future 60 Minutes interviews with presidential candidates will now come with full written transcripts.

“Another win for the American people,” a spokesman for Trump’s legal team said, delivered by the president who is holding “the fake news media accountable.”

But the implications stretch far beyond a single interview.

“The deal is the clearest sign yet that Mr. Trump’s ability to intimidate major American institutions extends to the media industry,” The New York Times wrote.

Inside CBS, the mood was grim. Journalists at 60 Minutes had seen the lawsuit not only as frivolous but as a direct challenge to their ability to report freely. Scott Pelley, a CBS correspondent, called any settlement “very damaging to CBS, to Paramount, to the reputation of those companies.” Veteran CBS reporter Lesley Stahl was even more blunt in an interview with the New Yorker. “There aren’t any damages. I mean, he accused us of editing Kamala Harris in a way to help her win the election. But he won the election,” she said. “It is a frivolous lawsuit.”

Still, Paramount folded. Why?

Part of the answer lies in the network’s fragile corporate situation.

Paramount+, the company’s flagship streaming service, is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Its CEO was ousted and replaced with an awkward ‘office of the C.E.O.’ Its cable business is in long-term decline, and its stock has plummeted more than 70 per cent over the last five years. All this while the company is negotiating a high-stakes merger with Skydance Media, one that needs the blessing of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to go through.

While FCC Chairman Brendan Carr publicly claimed the Trump lawsuit was unrelated to the FCC’s review of the Skydance deal, others weren’t so sure. The Times reported that some Paramount executives believed settling the lawsuit might smooth the path forward with regulators. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders warned that such a payout “could be construed as a bribe” and suggested congressional hearings might follow.

Even though the FCC regulates Paramount’s 27 local stations and not CBS News directly, Carr has taken a notably aggressive stance toward liberal media outlets. He opened inquiries into NPR and PBS, questioned public broadcasting funding, and revived reviews into the programming choices of ABC and NBC.

The lawsuit against CBS wasn’t even about Trump himself, who didn’t appear in the segment. Instead, Trump claims that 60 Minutes violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a law typically used by consumers against false advertising.

His claim centered on how CBS edited Kamala Harris’ remarks about Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Twenty-one seconds of the Harris interview aired on Face the Nation, and seven different seconds on 60 Minutes. CBS said it was edited for time, a standard practice in television, but Trump argued that it was designed to sway voters towards the Democratic nominee.

Legal scholars were baffled. “CBS’ speech is not commercial, It’s news,” wrote Noah Feldman, a Harvard law professor for Bloomberg. “If news on a network with advertising counted as commercial speech, the First Amendment as we know it would be gutted.”

Yet the case found a home in Amarillo, Texas, where there’s only one federal judge – Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee with a record of hardline rulings.

But the CBS settlement wasn’t an outlier. In recent years, Trump has extracted millions from media giants. Disney paid $15 million (plus $1 million in legal fees) over a defamation claim tied to George Stephanopoulos. Meta paid $25 million over Trump’s Facebook ban. Trump still has pending suits against the Des Moines Register and even the Pulitzer Prize committee.

In many cases, these lawsuits are legally shaky—but politically potent.

At the Pentagon, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, now Defence Secretary, reassigned press workspace away from outlets like Politico, NPR, NBC, and The New York Times in favour of Breitbart, One America News, and HuffPost – which hadn’t even asked for a spot. Reporters weren’t banned, but the message was clear.

“The opposition party is the media,” former advisor Steve Bannon told Frontline in 2019.

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump said he would jail reporters who refuse to reveal confidential sources, even joking about prison rape. “When this person realises that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,’” Trump warned at a rally.

Then, in 2023, he called on NBC to be investigated for treason over its coverage of criminal charges he faces. Similarly, after a contentious 2024 debate, he called for ABC News to lose its license.

“They oughta take away their license for the way they do that,” he told Fox & Friends.

Trump’s campaign has already changed how some major outlets operate. Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong of The Los Angeles Times both refused to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024, citing public mistrust in media and the political risks of alienating federal regulators.

Inside The New York Times, leadership is bracing for more to come. Executive Editor Joseph Kahn told NPR, “we shouldn’t pretend that [press protections] are only vulnerable in a place like Hungary or Turkey. They are also vulnerable here.”

And while Trump and his allies criticised the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to remove offensive content, Trump is doing the same thing, just more aggressively.

“[Trump] is demanding that a private company kowtow to him—or else,” wrote Reason magazine. “But his chilling crusade against the press… is an assault on the values that distinguish a liberal democracy from one that elects autocrats.”

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