Too corporate to fight for a free press

Too corporate to fight for a free press
Why Trump’s shameless shakedown of American media is so successful

By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published July 4, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)



(Salon) It just got a lot harder to make the case that any corporation should own a news operation.

Late Tuesday night, Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, announced a multimillion-dollar agreement with President Donald Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris that aired in October, a month before the presidential election. Complaining about the show’s edit, Trump baselessly cried “election interference” by the top-rated news broadcast. Later that month, he sued Paramount for $20 billion in damages. On Tuesday, Paramount settled the case for $16 million, an amount that will go toward Trump’s legal fees and future presidential library. The agreed settlement amounts to .08 percent of his original claim. But the damage is priceless.

Trump’s lawsuit was widely considered frivolous. News programs often edit interviews for length and clarity, and as the released transcript shows, Harris’ answers to host Bill Whitaker’s questions about what the U.S. could do to stop Israel’s war in Gaza from spinning out of control were hardly made to appear substantively better, as Trump has repeatedly complained.

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Right-wing media, meanwhile, is using Paramount’s payment as proof of media malfeasance, suggesting the company settled a winnable case because it sought to avoid potentially damaging discovery during a court trial. Major Trump booster Sean Hannity, citing Fox News Digital, misleadingly reported that “the settlement could include an additional, mid-eight-figure sum earmarked for future ads and public service announcements aligned with conservative causes.” Notably, the settlement does not include CBS issuing an apology to Trump.

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Reacting to the news on Wednesday, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts suggested the settlement “sounds like bribery in plain sight” and called for a congressional investiation, adding that she’s working to author legislation “to rein in this kind of corruption.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation indicated that it planned to file a shareholder’s lawsuit, because, ironically, it is shareholders who hold favorable grounds to sue in our corporatist system, not the people dependent on freedom of the press. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/04/too-corporate-to-fight-for-a-free-press/