CBS News veteran Scott Pelley has warned that a potential settlement between the network’s parent company and Donald Trump would be “very damaging” to the network and company and their reputations.
“It would be very damaging to CBS, to Paramount, to the reputation of those companies,” Pelley told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Saturday.
Pelley compared a potential settlement to Trump’s agreements with several law firms to provide pro-bono support to avoid sanctions from the administration after the president targeted firms and individual lawyers who represented his political opponents.
“I think many of the law firms that made deals with the White House are at this very moment regretting it. That doesn’t look like their finest hour,” Pelley said.
Trump’s spurious lawsuit accuses the network’s 60 Minutes program of favorably editing an interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign.
Paramount, the parent company of CBS, is considering a settlement in an alleged effort to coax the Trump administration to approve a merger with Skydance Media. At 60 Minutes, “everyone thinks this lawsuit is an act of extortion,” one correspondent recently told CNN.
Those discussions resulted in the abrupt resignations of 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, with warnings from First Amendment advocates fearing the administration’s chilling effect against the press and suggestions from members of Congress that the company could be breaking anti-bribery laws.
Asked about Owens’s resignation, Pelley echoed his blistering on-air statement that the longtime producer no longer believed that the network had lost “the independence that honest journalism requires.”
“Bill’s decision to resign may not have been much of a decision for him, because he was always the first person to defend the independence of 60 Minutes,” Pelley added.
“Bill didn’t work for Paramount. Bill worked for our viewers, and he felt very keenly about that. I’m not sure Bill had any choice. Once the corporation began to meddle in Bill’s decisions about the editorial content, or just place pressure in that area, Bill felt he didn’t have the independence that honest journalism requires.”
Pelley added that, on one hand, “you really wish the company was behind you 100 percent,” while on the other hand “my work is getting on the air.”
“While I would like to have that public backing, maybe the more important thing is the work is still getting on the air,” Pelley said.
His comments on the network followed CNN’s presentation of Broadway’s Good Night, and Good Luck and a discussion of the state of American journalism. Pelley said the play — in which George Clooney as Edward R. Murrow spars with Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of Red Scare hysteria — finds parallels in modern media under the current administration.
“I sense in the country today that there is also a fear to speak because it might wipe out your university, it might wipe out your law firm, it might ruin your career,” Pelley said.
“And the theme of all of that together today is that we have to have the courage to speak, as Americans, you can agree with the government or disagree with the government, but you must not be silent.”
Without that courage, “the country is doomed,” he said.
“It is the only thing that’s gonna save the country,” Pelley added. “You cannot have democracy without journalism. It can’t be done.”
His latest comments also echo his fiery commencement speech to Wake Forest University graduates against “the fear to speak” in the United States.
“Power can rewrite history, with grotesque, false narratives,” he said in his address. “They can make criminals heroes, and heroes criminals. Power can change the definition of the words we use to describe reality. Diversity is now described as illegal. Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends. There is nothing new in this.”
In recent court filings, Trump’s legal team claimed the president suffered “mental anguish” over the 60 Minutes interview with Harris and argued that the network is using “the First Amendment as a sword.”
In a pair of objections filed in response to the network’s motions to dismiss the defamation suit, which legal experts have described as “frivolous,” the president’s lawyers claim the president experienced personal financial harm from “news distortion.”
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