“[Paramount] Board members are cognizant that a huge settlement could be viewed as something of a payoff to the president to move the Skydance merger over the finish line, knowledgeable sources have said,” the Los Angeles Times wrote. Carr reportedly said this week that “the settlement and any discussions around that have nothing to do with the work that we’re doing at the FCC.”
In a statement provided to Ars today, Paramount said the “lawsuit is completely separate from, and unrelated to, the Skydance transaction and the FCC approval process. We will abide by the legal process to defend our case.”
As we’ve described previously, the allegations being examined by the FCC don’t appear to meet the agency’s historical standard for determining that a news station intentionally distorted the news. The complaint to the FCC and Trump’s lawsuit both focus on how CBS aired two different answers given by Harris to the same question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one on 60 Minutes and the other on Face the Nation. But CBS provided an unedited transcript and camera feeds of the interview that show that the two answers were just two different sentences from the same response.
While in court filings Paramount defended CBS’s First Amendment rights over editorial content, 60 Minutes Executive Producer Bill Owens resigned last week and alleged that he had lost editorial independence. Owens reportedly told staff in a memo that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience.”
This past weekend, journalist Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes criticized Paramount in an unusual on-air segment. “Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger,” Pelley said. “The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires. No one here is happy about it. But in resigning, Bill proved one thing: He was the right person to lead 60 Minutes all along.”
