• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 7, 2025

Some hard-pressed media companies continue to show sensitivities and vulnerabilities with regard to legal actions by the Trump Administration. The results typically come with financial settlements.

But is there another word for any and all similar transactions, even actions that could come in the future?

Before Paramount Global and Disney-ABC reached $16 million and $15 million settlements with their respective lawsuits from the Trump Administration, other media and technology money was exchanged with Trump.

Think back to January. Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to the Trump inaugural fund. So did Google, Apple, Microsoft and Adobe.

To be sure, fund-raising for Presidential inaugural events isn't a new thing. But with Trump, many say it's very different.

The Trump inaugural committee received more than $245 million in contributions -- doubling Trump’s own record-setting $88 million inauguration in 2017, and far more than the $61.8 million for Joe Biden’s in 2021.

And yet looking at all of this, there is an obvious pattern and reference to authoritarian rule, according to some analysts.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, says all this has companies thinking to “obey in advance” -- which, he says, is how authoritarians operate — and succeed. “Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy,” he writes.

This all comes on the heels of other settlements earlier this year. In January, Meta settled a 2021 Trump personal lawsuit for $25 million -- for allegedly engaging in "impermissible censorship" by removing the president from the social media platforms.

What about Elon Musk? In February of this year, X reached a $10 million settlement to settle a 2021 Trump personal lawsuit, according to reports.

Even with that payment, Musk now looks to be on the wrong side of things, especially now that he believes Trump's big bill -- now law -- strips out many tax breaks for forward-looking technology companies, in particular his SpaceX and Tesla companies.

Moving forward, who’s to say that more media deal-making and/or journalistic issues will not be under scrutiny by Trump -- especially Warner Bros. Discovery, Walt Disney and Comcast -- which have announced future spinoffs, that could also include outright sale of their linear TV networks?

Does that sound likely? Legal experts far and wide said the Trump lawsuit against Paramount Global for CBS News -- which concerned an “editing” disagreement -- had a near zero chance of going anywhere in court. They were other levers to pull.

People settle "frivolous" lawsuits all the time. Many -- even in the abstract -- sometimes toss around the "bribe" word.

George Cheeks, co-CEO at Paramount Global, at a shareholder meeting last Wednesday, said: “Companies often settle litigation to avoid the high and somewhat unpredictable cost of legal defense, the risk of an adverse judgment that could result in significant financial as well as reputational damage.”

So are all media reputations now intact? Or something else?