By Michael J. Socolow
It was a surrender widely foreseen. For months, rumors abounded that Paramount would eventually settle the seemingly frivolous lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump concerning editorial decisions in the production of a CBS interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024.
On July 2, 2025, those rumors proved true: The settlement between Paramount and Trump’s legal team resulted in CBS’s parent company agreeing to pay $16 million to the future Donald Trump Library – the $16 million included Trump’s legal fees – in exchange for ending the lawsuit. Despite the opinion of many media law scholars and practicing attorneys who considered the lawsuit meritless, Shari Redstone, the largest shareholder of Paramount, yielded to Trump.
Redstone had been trying to sell Paramount to Skydance Media since July 2024, but the transaction was delayed by issues involving government approval.
Specifically, when the Trump administration assumed power in January 2025, the new Federal Communications Commission had no legal obligation to facilitate, without scrutiny, the transfer of the CBS network’s broadcast licenses for its owned-and-operated TV stations to new ownership.
The FCC, under newly installed Republican Chairman Brendan Carr, was fully aware of the issues in the legal conflict between Trump and CBS at the time Paramount needed FCC approval for the license transfers. Without a settlement, the Paramount-Skydance deal remained in jeopardy.
Until it wasn’t.
At that point, Paramount joined Disney in implicitly apologizing for journalism produced by their TV news divisions.
Earlier in 2025, Disney had settled a different Trump lawsuit with ABC News in exchange for a $15 million donation to the future Trump Library. That lawsuit involved a dispute over the wording of the actions for which Trump was found liable in a civil lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll.
It’s not certain what the ABC and CBS settlements portend, but many are predicting they will produce a “chilling effect” within the network news divisions. Such an outcome would arise from fear of new litigation, and it would install a form of internal self-censorship that would influence network journalists when deciding whether the pursuit of investigative stories involving the Trump administration would be worth the risk.
Trump has apparently succeeded where earlier presidents failed.
Presidential pressure
From Jimmy Carter trying to get CBS anchor Walter Cronkite to stop ending his evening newscasts with the number of days American hostages were being held in Iran to Richard Nixon’s administration threatening the broadcast licenses of The Washington Post’s TV stations to weaken Watergate reporting, previous presidents sought to apply editorial pressure on broadcast journalists.
But in the cases of Carter and Nixon, it didn’t work. The broadcast networks’ focus on both Watergate and the Iran hostage crisis remained unrelenting.
Nor were Nixon and Carter the first presidents seeking to influence, and possibly control, network news.
President Lyndon Johnson, who owned local TV and radio stations in Austin, Texas, regularly complained to his old friend, CBS President Frank Stanton, about what he perceived as biased TV coverage. Johnson was so furious with the CBS and NBC reporting from Vietnam, he once argued that their newscasts seemed “controlled by the Vietcong.”
Yet none of these earlier presidents won millions from the corporations that aired ethical news reporting in the public interest.
Before Trump, these conflicts mostly occurred backstage and informally, allowing the broadcasters to sidestep the damage to their credibility should any surrender to White House administrations be made public. In a “Reporter’s Notebook” on the CBS Evening News the night of the Trump settlement, anchor John Dickerson summarized the new dilemma succinctly: “Can you hold power to account when you’ve paid it millions? Can an audience trust you when it thinks you’ve traded away that trust?”
“The audience will decide that,” Dickerson continued, concluding: “Our job is to show up to honor what we witness on behalf of the people we witness it for.”
Holding power to account
There’s an adage in TV news: “You’re only as good as your last show.”
Soon, SkyDance Media will assume control over the Paramount properties, and the new CBS will be on the airwaves.
When the licenses for KCBS in Los Angeles, WCBS in New York and the other CBS-owned-and-operated stations are transferred, we’ll learn the long-term legacy of corporate capitulation. But for now, it remains too early to judge tomorrow’s newscasts.
As a scholar of broadcast journalism and a former broadcast journalist, I recommend evaluating programs like “60 Minutes” and the “CBS Evening News” on the record they will compile over the next three years – and the record they compiled over the past 50. The same goes for “ABC World News Tonight” and other ABC News programs.
A major complicating factor for the Paramount-Skydance deal was the fact that “60 Minutes” has, over the past six months, broken major scoops embarrassing to the Trump administration, which led to additional scrutiny by its corporate ownership. Judged by its reporting in the first half of 2025, “60 Minutes” has upheld its record of critical and independent reporting in the public interest.
If audience members want to see ethical, independent and professional broadcast journalism that holds power to account, then it’s the audience’s responsibility to tune it in. The only way to learn the consequences of these settlements is by watching future programming rather than dismissing it beforehand.
The journalists working at ABC News and CBS News understand the legacy of their organizations, and they are also aware of how their owners have cast suspicion on the news divisions’ professionalism and credibility. As Dickerson asserted, they plan to “show up” regardless of the stain, and I’d bet they’re more motivated to redeem their reputations than we expect.
I don’t think reporters, editors and producers plan to let Donald Trump become their editor-in-chief over the next three years. But we’ll only know by watching.
Michael J. Socolow is Professor of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine.
Mark James says
I guess they should think before they report on something that is untrue.
Bo Peep says
Good maybe the News networks will stop slandering, spinning, and lying and start reporting the actual news so citizens can make their own decisions instead of being told what to think.
Deborah Coffey says
We are witnessing the death of our 250 year democratic experiment in America. What do you want to do about it, people? For starters, we could put all these “cavers” out of business by never using their services again!
Michael J Cocchiola says
The MAGA at the top thinks everything reported by sources other than Fox, Newsmax, OANN, or Daily Caller is fake news. Nothing will satisfy the MAGA Collective except to eliminate all who criticize Trump.
We are in a civil war… Democracy v. MAGA. Democracy is losing, and it’s the 3rd quarter. Not too late, but far too close for comfort.
Skibum says
For the couple of commenters above who wrongly believe that the CBS “60 Minutes” edited the interview with VP Harris to the point that it was somehow untrue or a lie, both of you need to know the facts. The entire interview was lengthy, and like all other news media that also includes yes… fauxinfotainment too, time is money and ALL of the TV networks pick certain parts of important interviews to show at different times in their schedules. “60 Minutes” chose one small portion of the whole interview to air on their evening show, while CBS chose to play another, different part of that same interview on their morning news show. CBS, ABC, NBC and drumph’s preferred news source all do it, and their reasoning that was discussed after this lawsuit and settlement was that by doing so, their audience gets to hear more of the interview than time would allow on a single program because “time is money” and they only have so many minutes to devote to each segment.
Well, that makes perfect sense if you are in the broadcast business. If you are in the maga conspiracy business, maybe not so much, so I really don’t expect to change the two commenter’s minds. But it is worth the effort to at least set the record straight and show that, at least in the CBS “60 Minutes” case, there was absolutely no deception, no lie, no coverup, and the money paid out in the settlement, as in many cases that the TV network could have rolled the dice and taken to court to try to win, was made in the corporate executive suite to mitigate the possibility of an even larger monetary award if they had fought the battle in civil court… just the same way that drumph’s fauxinfotainment network made a corporate decision to settle the civil case without going to court in that earlier lawsuit with the voting machine company.
It is easy to castigate a TV network that you don’t happen to agree with for making a business decision to protect their bottom line… easy for anyone else when it is not their money on the line. That doesn’t necessarily mean the network did anything wrong. I would have liked to have seen both CBS and ABC fight the administration in court the same way some of those high powered law firms fought back, and WON, instead of turning tail and giving in to drumph, paying millions just because they didn’t have the guts to stand up for their principles and fight, but it was not my money, not my reputation that was at stake, and what those TV networks did was make a decision they thought was best for them. End of story.
Laurel says
Trump is showing us what extreme government overreach is by his extreme behavior. It’s what happens when you take a baby’s rattle away.