On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that Paramount and CBS News had agreed to settle a lawsuit he brought against them for way more money than originally reported.
“Paramount/CBS/60 Minutes have today paid $16 Million Dollars in settlement, and we also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs, or similar Programming, for a total of over $36 Million Dollars,” Trump wrote. “This is another in a long line of VICTORIES over the Fake News Media, who we are holding to account for their widespread fraud and deceit.”
In May, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Shari Redstone, the chair of Paramount Global, raising questions about the lawsuit and its potential influence on a planned merger between Paramount and Skydance Media. A similar letter was sent to Skydance CEO David Ellison on Monday, expressing concerns that a seperate side deal involving Skydance and the Trump administration had been attatched to the P:aramolunt settlement. The merger’s approval has for months been caught in Federal Communications Commission purgatory, only seeming to regain momentum following the settlement earlier this month, and CBS News’ decision last week to ax the late night show of longtime Trump critic Stephen Colbert.
“People settle lawsuits all the time, but obviously there’s a problem when they’re seeking a favor and offering millions of dollars directly to the person who can grant the favor,” Warren told Rolling Stone on Wednesday. “It’s all happening right out in public for people to see, and that’s why it is so important to connect the dots and do two things: One is to call it out while the deal is still forming, so that all the parties understand that they may be subject to criminal laws. The second reason to call it out is that we have to speak out to preserve a free and independent press.”
Trump’s public bragging about the size of the settlement with Paramount is one of a string of similar lawsuits against other media companies, law firms, and other entities in retaliation for perceived slights against him or his political agenda. Earlier this week, Trump sued The Wall Street Journal over a report detailing a cryptic birthday letter he allegedly wrote to deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“SkyDance and Paramount want to do an $8 billion merger, but it takes the blessing of Donald Trump, so they seem to have found a workaround and have offered to settle what they earlier called a meritless lawsuit — a conclusion that pretty much every legal expert had agreed with,” Warren explained the corporation’s apparent attempt to curry favor with the president. “So right out in public, they offer to funnel $16 million directly into some future Trump library, in effect a slush fund for Trump to use as he sees fit.”
“Trump is finding every lever he can to misuse his power to kill any speech that’s critical of him. That’s true in the media. It’s true with universities, and it’s true with law firms,” Warren said. “He’s doing two things at once, enriching himself and shutting down criticism against him.”
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Last Wednesday, Warren and a coalition of Democrats unveiled legislation designated the Presidential Library Anti-Corruption Act. The law would close loopholes allowing Trump — and future presidents — from laundering potentially corrupt donations through presidential library funding. Several entities — from Paramount to the Qatari government — have funneled assets into Trump’s presidential library in the first months of his term. “Funding those libraries needs to wait until the president is no longer in a position to favor certain business interests or felons or anyone else hoping to earn favors from the president. That has to stop,” the senator says.
“No more lawsuit settlements, no more million-dollar plate dinners for felons who want pardons,” Warren added. Hinting at the difficulties Democrats have had passing any sort of legislation under the GOP-controlled Congress, the senator called for increased public pressure on elected lawmakers to check the president’s corrupt dealings. “The way it stops is when the American people don’t say, ‘I’m disgusted with Congress,’ and turn away, but say, ‘I’m disgusted, and I’m damn well going to make my senators and representatives change the law.’”
Warren has dedicated much of her public career to the fortification of consumer protection laws, a project that has been dealt significant blows under the Trump administration. Warren views the capitulation of corporations, law firms, and even universities to the financial authoritarianism of the president as a clear threat to the public good.
“The billionaires who run these major media companies may decide that it is in their own financial interests to ease up on criticism of Trump, but if they do so, they forfeit the role that the media has played in our democracy,” she said. “The media, the corporate CEOs running these media companies — owe the American public a frank description of how they make decisions about covering the president of the United States.”
“Sure we can all say, ‘Why didn’t they do that before?’” she added. “Right now, those companies are under assault, and this president has challenged coverage in a way unlike anything we’ve ever seen. There’s nothing subtle about it, and for the media company executives to pretend it’s not happening is deeply worrisome, because it raises the possibility that their plan is to quietly, softly give in.”
But if the entities the president is targeting are attempting to discreetly pay their way out of their disputes with Trump, the people actually experiencing the consequences of their Faustian bargains are not going quietly.
“It sunk in that they’re killing off our show,” Colbert said on Monday. “But they made one mistake, they left me alive.”
“I can finally speak the unvarnished truth to power and say what I really think about Donald Trump starting right now: I don’t really care for him. Doesn’t seem to have the skill set to be president. Just not a good fit,” he joked. When addressing a weekend Truth Social post in which Trump said he hoped he was the reason Colbert had been fired, the host responded with a straightforward: “Go fuck yourself.”
If only CBS and Paramount could muster a similar rigidness of spine.
From Rolling Stone US
