CBS News Agrees to a Humiliating Settlement

News broke overnight that the legal battle between CBS and Donald Trump over a deceptive broadcast from its highly-touted news program has come to an agreed-upon conclusion, and CBS News is fully shamed in the process. Beyond a significant penalty to be paid out, the news division is also facing a number of public revisions to its editorial practices. This is a major news division being swatted in the snout with a rolled up newspaper for befouling journalism.

It has been a long-simmering legal sparring match between President Trump and Paramount Global-CBS, one that has led to internal acrimony within the network and has impacted an ongoing corporate merger. Stemming from the “60 Minutes” broadcast last October, just before the general election, the heart of this case involved the deceptively edited interview with then candidate Kamala Harris.

As parent company Paramount is vying to complete a massive merger deal with Skydance Media things have stalled as this lawsuit over campaign tampering has affected that deal and had implications on government regulators approving the deal. Paramount has been pushing to close this affair and has been leaning on the news division - and the “60 Minutes” production specifically - to knuckle under and apologize. That has led to pushback from that production (including Scott Pelley scorching the parent company in one episode) and the pressure was significant enough that a longtime managing editor for the show and the CEO of the news division resigned their positions within weeks of each other.