President Trump sued CBS News and its parent company, Paramount, over the notorious 60 Minutes interview where the editors of 60 Minutes tried to help Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign by mis-editing their interview of her. Most famously, they revised an incoherent answer she gave to a question about the Middle East, in part by importing a portion of an answer that she gave to a different question. This misleading editing complied with no known journalistic standards, and CBS’s parent was obviously embarrassed by it.
The defendants have now settled with Trump for $16 million–another litigation win for Trump. I thought it would be interesting to see how CBS covered the settlement of its own case. Its story is entertaining as well as revealing:
Under the agreement, $16 million will be allocated to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library and the plaintiffs’ fees and costs. Neither Mr. Trump nor his co-plantiff, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, will be directly paid as part of the settlement.
The settlement did not include an apology.
Paramount also agreed that “60 Minutes” will release transcripts of interviews with presidential candidates in the future, “subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns,” the statement said.
So much for the facts. Now the editorializing begins:
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, filed last October when he was still a candidate for president, was widely viewed as an attack on the First Amendment.
Really? By whom? Journalists generally consider any criticism of their work an attack on the First Amendment, while at the same time being hostile to actual free speech by others.
This is wonderful:
The lawsuit was filed in Amarillo, Texas, a portion of a federal district court where the sole judge is a 2019 Trump appointee, and it was based on a state consumer protection law that is intended to prevent advertisers from misleading the public about a product being sold. CBS News is not headquartered in Texas, nor did the interview take place there.
So Trump’s lawyers judge-shopped? Imagine that! Just as the Democratic Party does in every single case where it wants to throw a monkey wrench into execution of an administration policy or of federal law. Maybe CBS News will now view such Democratic Party cases with a more jaundiced eye. Or maybe not.
CBS News views the staffers who departed over the incident as heroes:
Paramount has maintained that the lawsuit was completely without merit and that “60 Minutes” followed a standard editing process. The show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, stood behind the show’s interview and said he would not apologize. He announced in April that he would depart the network, citing a loss of editorial independence.
Weeks later, Wendy McMahon, who served as president and CEO of CBS News and Stations and CBS Media Ventures, announced she was also departing. “It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on a path forward,” she wrote in a note to staffers.
Back to the First Amendment:
Constitutional law expert and Harvard professor Noah Feldman called the case an “outrageous violation of First Amendment principles.”
Feldman is bitterly hostile to the Trump administration, but if the case was so outrageous, why didn’t CBS defend it? The federal courts are friendly to the First Amendment. If the case was outrageously unconstitutional, why didn’t CBS just move for summary judgment?
CBS got support from the usual suspects:
Politicians had also spoken out about the suit, urging Paramount Global Chair Shari Redstone not to settle. The day after McMahon announced her departure, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden sent a letter to Redstone raising concerns that efforts to settle with Mr. Trump would amount to bribery.
So you can’t settle a case with any public official, or it’s “bribery”? Right.
Personally, I doubt that Trump’s case against CBS was legally meritorious. But cases that lack legal merit are brought against corporations, and settled by corporations, all the time. Until now, as far as I know, that has never bothered CBS or pretty much any other news outlet. So, welcome to the world of imperfect legal systems. Is it too much to hope that CBS and 60 Minutes will learn something from this experience, and in the future treat lawsuits–oh, for example, lawsuits challenging enforcement of our immigration laws–with an appropriate degree of skepticism?
Just kidding.
