Paramount Criticized For Settling ’60 Minutes’ Lawsuit With Trump
July 2, 2025
Hours after Paramount Global agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle an election interference lawsuit filed by Trump against CBS News’ “60 Minutes” program, the media giant has come under fire for the deal.
The Writers Guild of America East July 2 said the settlement was a “transparent attempt to curry favors with an administration in the hopes it will allow Paramount Global and Skydance Media merger to be cleared for approval.”
The lawsuit, which Trump filed days before the 2024 presidential election claiming the “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President and Democrat presidential nominee Kamal Harris was selectively edited for partisan gain, was seen by many as the main reason the current Trump-controlled FCC has delayed approving Paramount’s $8 billion sale to Skydance.
Trump appointee and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has denied this, claiming the holdup involves whether Paramount’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies impacting its television broadcast licenses violated federal law.
Regardless, WGAE said the settlement is a threat to journalists covering the Trump administration and other public figures.
Earlier this year, ABC News paid Trump $15 million after he claimed anchor George Stephanopoulos’ incorrectly said the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, when the case involved only lesser claims of sexual abuse.
“The Writers Guild of America East stands behind the exemplary work of our members at ’60 Minutes’ and CBS News. We wish their bosses at Paramount Global had the courage to do the same,” the WGAE said in a statement.
Separately, Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican House representative from Illinois, in an op-ed, characterized the settlement as a “deal with the devil.”
“Let me be blunt: if Shari Redstone, who controls Paramount Global, caves to Donald Trump’s baseless, frivolous lawsuit against ’60 Minutes,’ she will be legitimizing authoritarianism,” Kinzinger wrote. “She’ll be giving aid and comfort to a man who has spent years trying to undermine the free press, warp reality, and dismantle the very institutions that protect American democracy.”
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in an op-ed in the New York Times, said Trump’s case was “negligible” and “frivolous.”
“Paramount should have fought this extortionate lawsuit in court, and it would have prevailed,” Jaffer wrote. “Now Trump’s presidential library will be a permanent monument to Paramount’s surrender, a continual reminder of its failure to defend freedoms that are essential to our democracy.”
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