Bill O'Reilly Breaks Down the Trump's Victory in CBS Lawsuit Settlement
President Trump sued CBS News’ 60 Minutes for election interference for selectively editing their interview with former presidential candidate Kamala Harris to make it look like the answers to her questions were not “word soup.”
The lawsuit was a bit of a stretch as Trump may have had to demonstrate how CBS likely violated FCC and FEC rules. Trump also may have had to demonstrate actual malice by the staff of 60 Minutes. However, the discovery process very well may have revealed emails, text messages and more showing how they were out to get Trump, so CBS caved and paid Trump $16 million to stop the discovery process.
Also, as Bill O’Reilly rightly states below, Paramount, the parent company of CBS, was considering selling several intellectual properties to Skydance Media. Now the plan is for the media giants to merger with Skydance taking a lead role. Perhaps Paramount believed government approval may have been jeopardized if this lawsuit was not settled.
This settlement follows victory settlements from Disney/ABC and Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
Other corporate media was none too happy:
The New York Times didn’t like the settlement, either:
For many veteran correspondents at “60 Minutes,” paying even $1 to settle a left-field lawsuit from an aggrieved president seemed too high a price.
At stake, they believed, was the long-term credibility of the country’s most decorated and most-watched television news program, a journalistic institution since 1968 that prided itself on holding elected leaders to account.
Late Tuesday, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, concluded differently. It agreed to pay $16 million so President Trump would drop a lawsuit that essentially boiled down to a politician’s gripe: that “60 Minutes” had edited an interview with his 2024 opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, in a manner that he did not like.