Dan Rather on Paramount’s $16 Million Trump Settlement: ‘It Was a Sell-Out to Extortion by the President’

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/dan-rather-paramount-trump-suit-settlement-sell-out-1236446675/

17 comments

  1. From the article: Legendary former CBS News anchor Dan Rather expressed disappointment Wednesday at Paramount Global‘s decision to pay $16 million to the Trump administration and settle its lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” report.

    “It’s a sad day for journalism,” Rather told Variety. “It’s a sad day for ’60 Minutes’ and CBS News. I hope people will read the details of this and understand what it was. It was distortion by the President and a kneeling down and saying, ‘yes, sir,’ by billionaire corporate owners.”

    Most legal scholars agreed the suit — in which Trump accused “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris — was frivolous and wouldn’t hold up under the First Amendment.

    “What really gets me about this is that Paramount didn’t have to settle,” Rather said. “You settle a lawsuit when you’ve done something wrong. ’60 Minutes’ did nothing wrong. It followed accepted journalistic practices. Lawyers almost unanimously said the case wouldn’t stand up in court.”

    Rather expressed a full backing of his former colleagues at CBS News and “60 Minutes”: “My support for them is total, absolute,” he said. “I do really think they fought a good fight on this, and they’ll continue to fight. The people on ’60 Minutes’ and at CBS News didn’t just take it lying down. They did their best to stop it.”

    Nonetheless, he said he wasn’t shocked by Paramount Global’s settlement. The decision to strike a deal was widely seen as a critical step to receiving approval from the Trump-controlled FCC for Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of the media conglom.

  2. They insured I will never have anything to do with them again. There is a word for people who bend the knees to Nazis without fighting. And that word ain’t fucking nice.

  3. – *”Under pressure from the FCC last winter, CBS released the tapes and transcript of the interview, and the raw materials confirmed that it engaged in normal editing, not any nefarious activity like Trump alleged.”* – https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/paramount-settles-trump-s-dubious-60-minutes-lawsuit-with-16-million-payout-and-no-apology/ar-AA1HNUNu

    …

    This is literally a $16,000,000 BRIBE to a sitting president so that the Paramount-Skydance merger is approved by the FCC – *which is controlled by five commissioners* **appointed by the president of the United States**.

  5. These people have no shame. When President Slime Ball is gone, it will be remembered who kissed his ass.

  8. Everytime he gets a settlement it’s a legal way for them to pay him bribes

  9. Truth, if you think you’re a journalist and you work at CBS, you’re not a journalist, you’re a propaganda mouth.

  11. Unfortunately corporations and even foreign governments are caving to trump and paying him off. This is extortion plain and simple. Apparently no one has learned from history and he’s only going to get worse and push it further.

  12. Legacy media is dead. May not survive this generation tbh. We held on for to long believing in integrity. Reps left that shit behind a long time ago and are running up the score on us now for it.

  13. 16 million is nothing to them. They just bribed the president for rhe equivalent of like $50 to a normal person.

  14. Look, we should never confuse a media company with a journalism platform. Paramount is and only is a business venture for rich people to get richer. That’s it. Nothing more.

    If news channels or programs will make them a profit, they will include them.

    Paramount wanted the Skydance deal and $16m is a tiny rounding error. The company isn’t trying to win any first amendment rights cases. It’s not fighting for us. They don’t care.

  15. Yeah, true. But yall gonna talking about everything that’s happening and do nothing but talk!

  16. Maybe don’t deceptively edit interviews to benefit one party then?

  17. I hope the next 60 minutes expose is “why our ceo is a spineless coward”

Comments are closed.