Heartbreak for CBS News

We must take back the press for the American people

Credit: Getty Images

We should be grateful and thankful that forums like Substack exist. They don’t need me tooting their horn, but imagine where we’d be without them. Reporting and analysis without corporate overlords is a good thing, an essential thing.

Legacy media, this nation’s bedrock for reliable reporting in my lifetime, is quickly going the way of the dodo … extinct. Witness none other than CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” the most popular television newsmagazine of all time, threatened by the sitting president.

It’s not a surprise. Authoritarians must silence their perceived opposition. President Trump believes his No. 1 opponent is a free press. He has long demonized the media, calling it “the enemy of the American people.” He couldn’t be more wrong. A free press is not the enemy, and our Founding Fathers knew it.

They enshrined freedom of the press in the very first amendment to the Constitution, up at the top of the Bill of Rights — not because they were great fans of journalists, but rather because they knew, as Thomas Jefferson put it, that “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be.”

It is because of this constitutionally protected role that I still prefer to use the word “press” over the word “media.” If nothing else, it serves as a reminder that radio, television, and the internet — along with newspapers — carry the same constitutional rights, mandates, and responsibilities that the founders guaranteed all journalists.

So, why are we back on this topic so soon? Because of yet another example of Trump trying, and perhaps succeeding, to silence an important voice: my home for 44 years, CBS News.

Back in October, “60 Minutes” requested sitdown interviews with both presidential candidates, as it has done for decades. Kamala Harris agreed. Donald Trump did not, claiming he was still waiting for an apology from correspondent Lesley Stahl. In the interview that aired on October 7, Harris answered a question about the war in Gaza. In a promo clip, a different part of that answer was used.

That is called editorial discretion. When an interview is not aired live, the interviewee knows that the journalists producing the final piece will use part, not all, of the interview. They make choices, just as print reporters do when writing a story.

Trump sued CBS News on October 31, six days before the election, alleging “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive and substantial news distortion.”

CBS News said in a statement that “the interview was not doctored.” And that “it did not hide any part of” Harris’s answer.

The suit had all the hallmarks of a public relations stunt. Trump was suing for a whopping $10 billion. That’s not a typo. The suit was filed in Texas because his lawyers were trying to use an antiquated state law. And guess who got the scoop on the story? Fox.

Legal experts called it “laughable,” “frivolous,” and “ridiculous junk.”

CBS moved to have the suit thrown out, stating that “the First Amendment prevents holding CBS liable for editorial judgments the President may not like.”

Then Trump won the election. And that “frivolous” lawsuit changed its tenor.

Most of America’s biggest news organizations have, over the past 40 years, been swallowed up with merger after merger, and acquisition after acquisition — to the point where they are now tiny parts of immeasurably larger corporate entities. The priority for those entities is not news. Saying it again for those in the back: The corporate parents of news organizations do not care about news.

They care about stock price, profit margins, and increasing shareholder value. And those corporations may also have regulatory issues before multiple arms of the government concerning a vast array of business interests that have nothing to do with their newsrooms. And that is the case with CBS News’ parent company, Paramount Global.

Paramount is in the midst of a multimillion-dollar merger, which needs approval by the Federal Communications Commission, now run by Trump’s appointee. And Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder and board member, stands to make billions if the deal goes through. See where this is going?

CBS, but really Paramount, is in settlement talks with Trump and co., according to The New York Times, which by the way is one of the few independent national newspapers. “A settlement would be an extraordinary concession by a major U.S. media company to a sitting president, especially in a case in which there is no evidence that the network got facts wrong or damaged the plaintiff’s reputation,” wrote Lauren Hirsch, James B. Stewart, and Michael M. Grynbaum in The Times.

If a settlement is reached, some might characterize it as a payoff. “That’s called a bribe,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s White House ethics lawyer, posted on X.

If CBS settles, it will be the third media company to do so since the election. ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library after he sued for defamation. Meta is giving $22 million to the library to settle a suit Trump brought after his social media accounts were suspended for cause.

I have spent much of my career in for-profit news, and I know it does not have to be this way. I have worked for news owners who, while they may have regarded their news divisions as an occasional irritant, chose to turn that irritant into a pearl of public trust. But today, sadly, it seems that the conglomerates that have control over some of the biggest pieces of this public trust would just as soon spit that irritant out.

A free press is a public trust. It is a free press that provides the raw material of democracy. But the media industrial complex is not where you will find it. All the more reason for citizens to seek out independent journalism. Seldom if ever before have our freedom and democracy depended on it.

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Stay Steady,
Dan