Commentary
Trump Lawsuit Against '60 Minutes' Is Theater Of The Absurd
- by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, May 30, 2025
The absurdity of Paramount Global’s negotiations with Trump over his meritless lawsuit against CBS and "60 Minutes" is demonstrated by the news coming out of the mediation process this week.
Attorneys for Trump and CBS parent Paramount Global have been negotiating a settlement with the help of a mediator for about a month.
According to The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, they are "far apart" on two issues -- money and an apology.
Trump’s lawsuit over an edit the producers of "60 Minutes" made in an interview with Kamala Harris that aired last October is based on Trump’s contention that this tweak amounted to nothing less than CBS’s intention to sway the presidential election.
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The claim is ridiculous and so is the amount of money Trump is asking in damages or fines or whatever -- $20 billion.
But now, according to the WSJ, the amounts under discussion are Paramount’s reported offer of $15 million vs. the Trump team’s figure of “more than” $25 million -- a concession of $19.975 billion on the part of Trump’s lawyers.
Their willingness to concede approximately 99.9% of their original demand also underscores the absurdity of the lawsuit.
As many people do when suing other people, Trump and his lawyers set their monetary demand by picking an outlandish number out of thin air.
“FAKE LAW!” Trump himself might have written on TruthSocial if someone sued him for $20 billion over nothing.
The other sticking point -- and in some ways a more important one -- is Trump’s demand that Paramount Global, CBS or "60 Minutes" issue an apology for this edit that apparently had no effect whatsoever on the November presidential election in light of the fact that Trump won handily.
It would be bad enough to have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million (a total the haggling might finally arrive at) for no reason except to have this lawsuit be over and done with.
But apologizing would be, in effect, an admission that CBS News made a small edit in some video because it wanted to play a part in preventing Donald Trump from winning a second term.
This would be a breach of journalistic ethics and/or journalistic malpractice. While CBS News isn’t perfect, it is doubtful anyone there gave a moment’s thought to the possibility that a small edit would have national consequences on Election Day, which it did not.
CBS News has already paid a high price stemming from the apology issue -- the resignations of “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens and CBS News President Wendy McMahon, who both quit rather than be put in the position of signing off on this “apology.”
And what about the threat hanging over the whole thing? It has been believed all along that if Paramount does not concede to Trump’s demands in this suit, he will apply the power of the presidency to squash Paramount’s proposed merger deal with Skydance Media.
I’m sure no one on Trump’s legal team has stated outright in the mediation meetings that if Paramount doesn’t acquiesce to the president’s wishes, they can kiss their merger deal good-bye.
But that has been the real sticking point all along. Basically, it’s blackmail.
I've been an avid reader of MP for the past 20 years and the complete abandoment of objectivity covering the media has become absurd ever since Trump was elected president.
The "story" is not the lawsuit or the money. What your entire staff fails to recognize is that these lawsuits are exposing the actual truth. Your piece last week referred to this as a "tiny" edit. Now you refer to it as a "small" edit.
Anyone who is reasonably objective who sees Harris' unedited comments and what was aired are two VERY different things. They never felt the need to edit Trump's answers, but they took absolute word salads and incoherent verbal vomiting to make Harris sound resolute and confident - and that is NOT how she responded.
The lawsuits force the legacy news outlets to disclose internal documents guiding "journalists" to proclaim a narrative vs. truth. The lawsuits force disclosure of emails and discussions and texts that prove objectivity was not the goal, but to present the story that the network wanted to present. ABC memos reveal Stephanopolous was repeatedly warned not to call Trump a convicted rapist, CNN memos reveal the Covington Kid story was absolute horsesh-it, and CBS doesn't want to answer why these "editing" decisions were made to show Harris as articulate when she was anything but.
So now, CBS has settled. If all of these people quit and CBS really felt it was in the right, it would keep fighting.
MediaPost is no longer an industry watchdog or objective bystander. Its continuous defending of malpractice by legacy news outlets illustrates that the entire staff's agenda is to promote an agenda and not provide objective guidance to its audience.
In closing, study after study proves that the American people don't give any credence to legacy news outlets and the majority of Americans, especially those under the age of 40, get the majority of their news from influencers and independent outlets.
Legacy news outlets are not being demonized. They've dug their own graves and MediaPost and it's agenda driven staff further reinforces why the general public has largely turned its back on legacy "news" outlets. And also reinfoces how MediaPost has gone from a trusted source to water-carrying monkeys with no vision for the future of the media.
Came to see if one of the usual four or five Trump cultists who read Mediapost would respond to a cogent and well-written article with a crazy rant against "the media" etc... and I was not disappointed! Well done, Dan. Have a great week inside that labyrinthine brain of yours.
Dan, while you are correct that young adults--mainly those aged 18-29, not so much those aged 30-39 or older---claim that they get "news"--whatever that means--- from social media, which I suspect includes YouTube--they also use a large number of "legacy" sources for "news". For example a just completed study of 2210 adults by YouGov reported that while 73% of its 18-44 respondents said thay used "social media" for "news" in the past month, 48% said that they used "TV", 39% used news websites, 25% newspapers and podcasts and 24% radio. Being a bit more specific it seems in a second round of questionning, 43% cited CNN, 28% the BBC, ABC, CBS and NBC tied with 24% each--meaning that their cume was probably around 45%---- while MSNBC was used by 15%, PBS and NPR both by 11%, etc.
When you look at the individual TV sources cited individually and compare those findings to what "TV" got as an overall appraisal, it's evident the when the question is posed in ageneral way--"TV" versus "social media"---without asking about specific sources, there is a tendency to rate "TV" negatively. But when you ask about CNN, FOX, ABC, PBS, etc, one by one, you get a more realistic picture as most respondents don't want to lie. Looking at the YouGov findings I suspect that the real cume for the various "TV" sourxes is probably around 75%, for the 18-44s, not the 48% answer that was elicited in the general questionning phase.
Also, YouGov didn't ask what kind of "news" was gotten from each source or how much time was devoted to it. In addition to sample composition, this is a comkmon failing in many of these online "quickie" studies--the researchers are afraid they'll lose many respondents if they demand too much of them.