Paramount has agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” the company said late Tuesday, an extraordinary concession to a sitting president by a major media organization.
Paramount said its payment includes Mr. Trump’s legal fees and costs and that the money, minus the legal fees, will be paid to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library.
As part of the settlement, Paramount also agreed to release transcripts of “60 Minutes” interviews with eligible U.S. presidential candidates after such interviews have aired, subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns. The settlement does not include an apology.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Many lawyers dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit as baseless and believed that CBS would ultimately prevail in court, in part because the network did not report anything factually inaccurate, and the First Amendment gives publishers wide leeway to determine how to present information.
But Shari Redstone, the chair and controlling shareholder of Paramount, told her board that she favored exploring a settlement with Mr. Trump. Some executives at the company viewed the president’s lawsuit as a potential hurdle to completing a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to the Hollywood studio Skydance, which requires the Trump administration’s approval.
The sale would end the Redstone family’s decades-long control of CBS News and Paramount Pictures and put it in the hands of David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, a tech billionaire who has backed Mr. Trump. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has said that the president’s lawsuit against Paramount was not linked to the F.C.C.’s review of the company’s merger with Skydance. Paramount has also said that the two issues were unrelated.
Within the CBS newsroom, a prospective settlement was seen as a low moment in the near-century-long history of a network that once housed Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, whose famed rebuff of McCarthyism in the 1950s was recently depicted on the Broadway stage by George Clooney. “60 Minutes,” which pioneered on-air investigative reporting, recently completed its 51st consecutive season as the country’s most-watched news program.
CBS is not the first broadcast news division to make a major concession to Mr. Trump. In December, ABC News paid $16 million to settle a defamation case filed by Mr. Trump against the network and one of its anchors, George Stephanopoulos.
Mr. Trump sued Paramount for $10 billion last year, claiming that “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris in order to interfere with the election.
The transcript of the interview showed that Ms. Harris gave a lengthy answer to a question about Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. About 21 seconds of that answer aired in a preview of the interview on “Face the Nation,” another CBS News show. A different seven-second part of the answer aired the next day in a prime-time episode of “60 Minutes.”
Mr. Trump said in his lawsuit that CBS’s actions amounted to “news distortion” that was aimed at tipping the scales in favor of the Democratic Party. Paramount disputed that characterization.
Even before its resolution, Mr. Trump’s lawsuit — and Ms. Redstone’s apparent willingness to entertain a settlement — had engulfed CBS News in turmoil. Tensions within the network over how to handle the president’s legal attacks contributed to the resignation of the “60 Minutes” executive producer, Bill Owens; the CBS News president, Wendy McMahon, was later forced out.
Watching the case with Mr. Trump unfold, many CBS journalists believed the long-term credibility of “60 Minutes” was at stake. Scott Pelley, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent, said last month that any settlement would be “very damaging to CBS, to Paramount, to the reputation of those companies.”
Executives at CBS and Paramount applied more scrutiny than usual to segments on “60 Minutes” that could be construed as critical of the Trump administration. CBS News has not killed a story because of the pressure, but Mr. Owens, when he resigned in April, said he “would not be allowed” to make independent journalistic decisions. Ms. McMahon said when she left that it had ”become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”
Ms. Redstone told the board she was recusing herself from its discussions of how to handle the Trump suit, given that her financial stake in the pending Skydance deal is so much greater than the stakes of other shareholders, whose interests the directors are expected to represent. This spring, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and has recently been receiving treatment.
Even before her diagnosis, though, she told board members that she wanted the company to explore a settlement with Mr. Trump. Ms. Redstone has said she wants to avoid a protracted legal war with the president that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardize other divisions that have business with the government.
Ms. Redstone has also told confidants that she harbors concerns about the editorial judgment of CBS News. She has acknowledged being troubled by some of her network’s news coverage and on occasion has raised those concerns publicly and spoken to corporate leadership.
Senators like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont have warned that any payment by Paramount to Mr. Trump could be construed as a bribe, and they said they would consider holding a congressional hearing about it.
The prospect of being accused of bribery, and perhaps facing legal action because of it, had vexed Paramount’s directors, who had to weigh the corporate benefits of a settlement against the perception that they were greenlighting a deal to secure an unrelated merger.
Freedom of the Press Foundation, a First Amendment group, has said it planned to file a lawsuit on behalf of shareholders against Ms. Redstone and the Paramount board in the event of a settlement; the group has retained the prominent litigator Abbe Lowell for its effort.
The deal came less than a day before Paramount had planned to make changes to its board of directors, a change that could have complicated the settlement negotiations. Judith McHale, a long-serving director, is leaving, and the company is planning to add three new directors: Mary Boies, counsel to the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner; Charles E. Ryan, a co-founder of Almaz Capital; and Roanne Sragow Licht, an adjunct professor at Boston University.
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
Michael M. Grynbaum is a media correspondent at The Times. He is the author of “Empire of the Elite,” a cultural history of Condé Nast magazines.
Lauren Hirsch is a Times reporter who covers deals and dealmakers in Wall Street and Washington.
David Enrich is a deputy investigations editor for The Times. He writes about law and business.
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