CBS News and Stations CEO Wendy McMahon is leaving the network, the latest casualty as its parent company tries to broker a truce with Donald Trump.
McMahon alluded to the network’s battles with the president in a memo to staff on Monday, less than 24 hours after 60 Minutes aired its season finale, and admitted “the past few months have been challenging.”
Her exit comes as CBS’ parent company Paramount Global negotiates a settlement to Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against the network over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Controlling shareholder Shari Redstone is hoping for a quick settlement so as to not provide a roadblock to Paramount’s merger with Skydance.
Lawyers for Trump and Paramount entered into settlement talks last month.
“It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward,” she wrote to staff in a memo obtained by the Daily Beast. “It’s time for me to move on and for this organization to move forward with new leadership.”
CBS News did not comment. Paramount Global declined to comment.
White House communications director Steven Cheung praised the exit in an X post on Monday, posting a gleeful emoji reacting to the news.
The news rankled staff on Monday, with some pinning the departure on CBS CEO George Cheeks for letting top leaders leave to appease the parent company.
“I think people are very disappointed” in Cheeks, one CBS staffer told the Daily Beast. “He is letting some truly amazing people walk out the door.”
Cheeks praised McMahon in his own memo on Monday, though he made no allusion to her disagreements with company leadership. He said CBS News president Tom Cibrowski and CBS Stations president Jennifer Mitchell would report to him in the interim.
“I want to thank Wendy for her partnership over the past four years. Under her leadership, the competitive position and culture at our television stations have improved dramatically, and we’ve expanded local news significantly,“ he wrote, praising her work on streaming.
”In a rapidly changing world, Wendy and her teams have worked diligently to articulate a vision and lay a foundation that adapts our news operations for the future,” he added.
Trump sued the network, initially for $10 billion last year, after CBS promoted a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris in October that included a clip on Face the Nation that featured one part of an answer on Israel’s war in Gaza. But when the episode aired the next day as part of a special edition of 60 Minutes—one Trump refused to participate in—it featured a different part of the answer.
Trump claimed the network engaged in a form of news distortion, though CBS News said its interview followed standard journalistic practice and defended its interview on First Amendment grounds. Trump upped the lawsuit to $20 billion earlier this year. Incidentally, the Harris interview was subsequently nominated for an Emmy Award in the Best Editing category.
Still, despite legal experts’ opinions that the lawsuit is flawed, Paramount Global entered into settlement talks with Trump’s legal team last month as controlling shareholder Shari Redstone seeks to merge the company with David Ellison’s Skydance, which would net her a $2.4 billion payout for her family’s share.
Redstone’s aggressive pursuit of securing the Trump administration’s blessing included demanding Cheeks notify her about negative Trump stories last month, according to Bloomberg.
It came after Trump rebuked 60 Minutes over an episode that covered his pursuit to take Greenland and featured an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 60 Minutes never amended any of its programs, and it aired a story last month that examined Trump’s attacks on law firms.
CBS staffers have chastised Redstone both publicly and privately.
Bill Owens, 60 Minutes’ executive producer, told staff in his exit announcement he lost his ability “to make independent decisions” on the show’s programming after he refused to apologize for the Harris interview.
He praised McMahon for her leadership, and she said in her memo on his departure that it was “an easy decision” to stand by Owens despite company pressures.
During the episode after Owens announced his exit, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley took CBS and Paramount to task for letting Owens walk out the door and said it “was hard on him and hard on us.”
“But our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” Pelley said. “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.”
CBS’ Stephen Colbert also chided Redstone in a Late Show episode last week, referencing her demands during an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
“There are reports that the owner of this company called the president—or called the chairman of this company—and said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got to get the news to lay off any bad Trump stories,’” he told her. “And the word is that that was not passed on to the news division, I’m happy to say.”
The post CBS News’ Top Boss Quits as Paramount Tries to Settle with Trump appeared first on The Daily Beast.
