CBS and its “60 Minutes” have long stood as shining beacons of broadcast news.
The Sunday night newsmagazine, with its ubiquitous ticking clock, earned a reputation for not backing down from a fight. For a half-century, the show established the standard for TV investigative reporting with its no-holds-barred questioning of U.S. presidents and others in power.
But a different clock is ticking.
President Trump’s new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, this week demanded CBS turn over the full, unedited transcript of its “60 Minutes” interview in October with former Vice President Kamala Harris, including film footage from the different camera angles.
That interview provoked the ire of Trump, who filed a lawsuit against CBS alleging the network was engaged in deceptive editing practices.
“We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do,” CBS said Friday in a statement.
The latest development comes as Paramount Global lawyers engage in preliminary talks to settle the lawsuit Trump filed in October over his objection to edits to the “60 Minutes” interview. Trump alleged the network “deceptively” edited the interview to present Harris more favorably in the closing weeks of the election.
Lawyers for Trump and Paramount on Friday asked a Texas judge to extend a key deadline in the court case to give the two sides additional time to try to hammer out a truce.
The FCC inquiry raises the stakes in the dispute, which has stoked fears that Trump and his team are using levers of power to chill unflattering news coverage. Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has been agitating for her team to settle Trump’s lawsuit to facilitate her family’s sale of Paramount to David Ellison’s Skydance Media, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment.
Paramount needs the approval of the FCC for the Skydance deal to advance.
The company’s seeming willingness to placate Trump has roiled journalists, including within CBS News. First Amendment experts initially interpreted Trump’s “60 Minutes” lawsuit as a political stunt. They said settling the case with Trump would deliver a crushing blow to CBS News’ legacy.
“This is an act of pure cowardice for short-term gain that corrupts every journalistic value imaginable,” said USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Gabriel Kahn.
“It is a sad day,” 1st Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams wrote Friday in an email to The Times. “It’s heart-breaking that CBS —say it again, CBS — seems ready to pay big bucks for its own editing decisions.”
The storied news division has maintained “60 Minutes” as the gold standard in television journalism for more than five decades. People inside the company, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said they fear the move will not only tarnish the “60 Minutes” brand but also set a dangerous precedent that could encourage the Trump administration and others to weaken journalism institutions.
“You think in the next four years we’re not going to say something that’s going to get him riled up again and he’ll do this again?” said one veteran journalist in the division.
Anger over a possible settlement runs so deep that CBS News could experience an exodus of journalists and even executives if the company caves to Trump’s demands, some said.
George Cheeks, co-chief executive of Paramount Global, has been made aware of the news division’s concerns over how a settlement would be perceived in the industry and its broader impact on press freedom. Paramount Global board members also have received pleas from inside the news division to fight the Trump lawsuit, sources said.
“It’s a literal kowtow … a sign of obeisance toward a new overlord — a.k.a. the Trump family — which is exactly the relationship that media owners in Belarus, Hungary and Russia have with the regimes there,” Kahn said. “This is essentially a crack in the foundations of our free press.”
Cheeks spent months trying to navigate choppy waters amid Redstone’s increasing unhappiness with CBS News and “60 Minutes” over its coverage of the war in Gaza.
Redstone has not publicly expressed an opinion on the Trump settlement talks. A spokesperson for the mogul declined to comment.
People close to the lawsuit describe the settlement talks as preliminary. Some executives privately suggested that settling the lawsuit was the price of doing business in Trump’s second administration. These people viewed a settlement as an efficient means to keep CBS out of court and expedite the completion of the Skydance deal.
Paramount and Skydance Media also declined to comment.
CBS News executives were already discussing releasing a full transcript of the interview with Kamala Harris before the FCC inquiry. But they saw that as a dangerous precedent because raw transcripts of edited interviews are typically only released to address issues related to possible defamation. Trump’s lawsuit is not a defamation case.
