rodoheel
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Paramount in Settlement Talks With Trump Over ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit
A settlement, if reached, would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president.
It's hard to express how much contempt I would have for Paramount if they settled this lawsuit. The ABC settlement over George Stephanopoulos's suit was bad enough, but at least there was a theoretical path to a libel ruling there. Trump's suit against Paramount for 60 Minutes supposedly "deceptively" editing an interview with Kamala Harris is absolute laughable dreck that will be thrown out on a motion to dismiss by any judge with two working brain cells. The theory that Trump was wronged or damaged by the interview in any way was completely without merit when it was filed, and even more so now that he WON THE ELECTION.
It sounds like Paramount's logic for settling is that they want the Trump admin to approve their merger and the Trump team is leaning on this is leverage. Leaving aside that it is entirely illegal for an elected official to leverage the threat of regulatory action for his own personal benefit, I can't believe even in today's culture of corporate leaders rushing to stroke Trump off in exchange for favors that Paramount is willing to debase itself like this. They should be raising holy hell about the fact that anyone in Trumpland would even suggest that this suit is leverage for approving the merger or any other action. But this is the problem when media networks are all gobbled up by large corporate conglomerates - they're more worried about the earnings report for shareholders than about ethics or morals.
Every single person associated with 60 Minutes should quit if this happens. Probably every single news person at CBS should quit. It would be an absolute betrayal of the newsroom by the parent company. For all the whining about "Mainstream Media" by the MAGA crowd, this is the real problem in modern media - gutless corporate overlords who are so concerned about sucking up to the president that they refuse to cover him accurately. The NYT isn't perfect, but they seem like the closest thing we have at this point to a major mainstream news organization that isn't actively bending the knee to Daddy Trump.