Scott Pelley said that a settlement of Donald Trump‘s lawsuit would be “very damaging” to the reputation CBS and Paramount, while the 60 Minutes correspondent also defended a recent commencement speech where he warned of the threats to freedom of speech.
Appearing on CNN‘s post show following the live telecast of Good Night, And Good Luck, Pelley sat down down fellow 60 Minutes correspondent and CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.
“If there is a settlement, and as part of a settlement, there’s an apology, how damaging is that to CBS?”
“It will be very damaging to CBS, to Paramount, to the reputation of those companies,” Pelley said. “I think many of the law firms that made deals with the White House are at this very moment regretting it. That doesn’t look like their finest hour.”
As CBS-parent Paramount Global seeks Trump administration approval of its merger with Skydance, company lawyers have been in talks to settle the president’s lawsuit against the network. Trump sued CBS for $20 billion over the way that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited. The lawsuit, filed under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a law typically invoked for false advertising claims, has been deemed baseless by a number of legal observers.
Cooper called the situation “very strange.”
“You really wish the company was behind you 100%, right?” Pelley said. “You really wish the top echelons of the company would come out publicly and say, ’60 Minutes, for example, is a crown jewel of American journalism, and we stand by it 100%. I haven’t heard that.”
“On the other hand, my work is getting on the air, and I have not had anyone outside 60 Minutes out their thumb on scale and say, ‘You can’t say that. You should say this. You have to edit the story this way. You should interview this person. None of that has happened.’ So I while I would like to have that public backing, maybe the more important thing is the work is still getting on the air.”
Still, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, resigned in April, concluding that he no longer had the ability to make independent decisions about the show, as in the past it has been walled off from corporate interference.
“Bill’s decision to resign may not have been much of a decision for him, because he was always the first person to defend the independence of 60 Minutes. Bill didn’t work for Paramount. Bill worked for our viewers, and he felt very keenly about that, and so I’m not sure Bill had any choice once the corporation began to meddle in Bill’s decisions about the editorial content, or just place pressure in that area. Bill felt he didn’t have the independence that honest journalism requires.”
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