'Bend the knee': CBS considers settling Trump’s '60 Minutes' lawsuit to get merger approved

17 January

President-elect Donald Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News for alleged "deceptive conduct" may end up with him raking in a significant sum of cash in exchange for the incoming administration green-lighting a proposed merger.

That's according to a Wall Street Journal article published Friday, which reported that executives at the network are mulling whether to offer a settlement to the president-elect as a gesture of goodwill. CBS parent company Paramount is reportedly hoping a settlement will lead to its potential merger with Skydance Media being approved by federal regulators.

"It’s become clear to executives at both companies that Trump’s dissatisfaction with CBS News will make the review tougher than they anticipated, and that they’ll likely need to offer concessions to win approval," wrote the Journal's Jessica Toonkel and Drew FitzGerald, citing "people familiar with the situation."

Trump initially filed the suit just before the November election, arguing that CBS selectively edited Vice President Kamala Harris' interview with 60 Minutes reporter Bill Whitaker. His complaint accused the network of "malicious, deceptive and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive and mislead the public." Trump declined his own interview with 60 Minutes, even though the program traditionally interviews both major party candidates ahead of each presidential election.

As Semafor reporter David Weigel observed, Trump's lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas, even though Trump is a resident of Florida and CBS is headquartered in New York and incorporated in Delaware. Weigel tweeted that if the suit went to court, it would be assigned to U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who is a Trump appointee that regularly issues rulings favorable to the president-elect. Even if Kacsmaryk rules in CBS' favor, Trump's legal team could appeal an unfavorable decision to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is widely regarded as by far the most conservative federal circuit.

The Journal noted that no settlement offer has been formally entered, and that executives are still contemplating whether to litigate or settle with the incoming president. CBS is also reportedly considering making other concessions to Trump, like releasing the full transcript of Whitaker's interview with Harris and "adding new processes around programming."

“What’s going on here is a lot of bluster to discipline the future operations of CBS,” public interest attorney Andrew Jay Schwartzman told the outlet. “My guess is that this is just to kind of soften them up and a warning to others.”

The Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Office of General Counsel typically reviews merger proposals, and incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr (who authored the section of Project 2025 that mentions FCC reform) has indicated that perceived bias will play a role in determining whether to approve mergers of media conglomerates. But former FCC official Blair Levin said that a media company allowing the Trump administration to influence its journalism could trigger a costly boycott from high-profile voices in Hollywood.

"Paramount has the same problem, which is if you bend the knee on the editorial side, there’s a talent problem on the streaming side," Levin said.

The president-elect has already obtained a $15 million settlement from a previous lawsuit against ABC, and he has an ongoing lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer, who published a poll just before the election predicting Harris would narrowly win the Hawkeye State. The Register has said it plans to fight the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.

Click here to read the Journal's report in its entirety (subscription required).

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