It was an aside, caught on camera, that said a lot about the uneasy business of conducting journalism today.
Moments after President Trump finished taping a 13-minute interview on Tuesday with the “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil in Michigan, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, approached Mr. Dokoupil and his colleagues to convey a message from the president.
“He said, ‘Make sure you guys don’t cut the tape, make sure the interview is out in full,” Ms. Leavitt said in an even tone, according to a recording of the exchange obtained by The New York Times.
“Yeah, we’re doing it, yeah,” Mr. Dokoupil responded.
Ms. Leavitt replied: “He said, ‘If it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”
In 2024, Mr. Trump did sue CBS over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview — and the network’s corporate parent paid $16 million to settle the case, despite many legal experts saying it had little merit.
Some of the CBS personnel who were there absorbed Ms. Leavitt’s remarks as being in jest, according to a person familiar with their thinking. CBS News aired the full unedited interview that evening, which the network said was its plan all along.
“The moment we booked this interview, we made the independent decision to air it unedited and in its entirety,” CBS News said in a statement on Saturday.
Ms. Leavitt, reached for comment, said: “The American people deserve to watch President Trump’s full interviews, unedited, no cuts. And guess what? The interview ran in full.”
Not long ago, the notion of a White House press secretary casually threatening a lawsuit if a journalist does not obey her orders would be shocking.
But Mr. Trump has made abundantly clear that he is serious about pursuing legal or regulatory action against media outlets whose coverage displeases him.
The president regularly sues news organizations, including The Times, and his Justice Department on Wednesday searched the home of a Washington Post reporter and seized her laptops and other devices. His Pentagon has barred reporters who did not promise to limit their news gathering, and the Defense Department said it planned to commandeer Stars and Stripes, the government-funded military paper with a tradition of editorial independence. Ms. Leavitt routinely berates reporters at press briefings, including on Thursday when she denounced a journalist from The Hill as “a left-wing hack.”
Reporters who cover the White House continue to report aggressively, and Mr. Trump continues to sit for lengthy interviews with major news organizations, including The Times. He also fields more informal questions from reporters than any of his recent predecessors.
But he has also extracted settlements from Meta, Google, Ivy League universities and some of the country’s most prestigious white-shoe law firms. Powerful news media companies are walking a tightrope, too: before CBS settled, ABC paid $16 million in 2024 to settle a separate suit from Mr. Trump over remarks by its anchor George Stephanopoulos. The Washington Post’s publisher said the raid on the home of his reporter was “outrageous,” and the newspaper’s editorial board condemned the incident. But the paper’s owner, the billionaire Jeff Bezos, has been silent.
In the audio recording from Tuesday, the CBS group seemed surprised by Ms. Leavitt’s comment — “Oh, great, OK!” Kim Harvey, the “CBS Evening News” executive producer, replied — and Mr. Dokoupil quickly turned to humor. “He always says that!” he told Ms. Leavitt in a light tone, referring to Mr. Trump, who indeed urges reporters to publish his interviews in full.
Ms. Leavitt did not laugh.
The decision by CBS’s owner Paramount to settle the “60 Minutes” lawsuit has loomed large at CBS News.
Shortly after the settlement, the Trump administration approved a deal for Paramount to be sold to Skydance, a Hollywood studio run by the technology scion David Ellison. Mr. Ellison soon hired the opinion journalist Bari Weiss, a frequent critic of mainstream news outlets, as CBS News’s editor in chief.
Ms. Weiss’s editorial judgment has been viewed skeptically by critics inside and outside of CBS who have wondered, in light of the president’s lawsuit, if she is trying to make the news division more Trump-friendly — a claim she rejects. Mr. Ellison, her boss, is now pursuing a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery that would also require administration approval, and Mr. Trump has continued to weigh in on CBS News coverage, castigating the network when he deems it unfriendly.
That is a tough shadow for any network news chief to operate under. It was the backdrop for the firestorm in December when Ms. Weiss postponed a “60 Minutes” segment about the Trump administration sending Venezuelan migrants to a brutal Salvadoran prison; Ms. Weiss said the segment needed more reporting, but her critics saw proof of pro-Trump censorship.
Hence the power of Ms. Leavitt’s words to Mr. Dokoupil on Tuesday. Once a president is willing to sue a news outlet, and the outlet is willing to settle, the calculus for its journalists has indelibly, inexorably changed.
When Mr. Dokoupil’s interview with the president aired in full that night on the “CBS Evening News,” it included questions about grocery prices, Iran, the immigration crackdown in Minnesota and other topics. It concluded with Mr. Trump mocking the anchor, who started his new CBS job this month.
Boasting about his economic policies, the president told Mr. Dokoupil that the anchor “wouldn’t have a job right now” if Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election.
At the interview’s end, Mr. Dokoupil circled back to the subject. “For the record,” he told Mr. Trump, “I do think I’d have this job even if the other guys won.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Trump replied. “But at a lesser salary.”
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
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