Donald Trump just can’t stop griping about 60 Minutes and how the vaunted CBS Sunday night newsmagazine is very nasty and unfair to him.
At the same time, the president’s obsession with the long-running program is causing him to blast the new ownership of CBS News’ parent company Paramount, which has been blatantly currying favor with him in an effort to secure his approval of its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery.
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before. If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!” Trump fumed in a Tuesday Truth Social rant.
The president’s screed comes a week after he melted down over a 60 Minutes interview with Trump loyalist turned foe Marjorie Taylor Greene, grousing that the broadcast showed that Paramount chairman David Ellison – whom he has repeatedly praised as a “great person” was “NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP.”
Meanwhile, Ellison – along with his ultrawealthy father Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder and longtime Trump ally – has been banking on his family’s close ties with the president to give him a leg up in his aggressive attempt to acquire WBD and add it to his burgeoning media empire.
While Trump has seemed to privately and publicly favor Paramount in the bidding war for Warner Bros. – the studio’s board of directors has already approved an offer from Netflix – he appears to want the Ellisons to know who is in charge, and that’s him.
On the same day that the younger Ellison submitted the hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, the president raged about the Greene interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl, which featured the Georgia congresswoman claiming Trump was “directly fueling” death threats against her family.
Besides attacking Greene and Stahl over the interview, Trump blasted Ellison – without naming him – for seemingly allowing the interview to air in the first place. The president also made a point of referencing the $16 million the prior Paramount leadership paid him to settle a “meritless” lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. That settlement took place weeks before the Trump administration approved Paramount’s merger with Ellison’s Skydance.
“My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!” Trump exclaimed. “Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!”
Later that afternoon, the president was still steaming about the telecast and suggested to White House reporters that he was no longer on friendly terms with the Ellisons.
“I know the companies very well. I know what they are doing. But I have to see… what percentage of market they have. We have to see the Netflix percentage of market, Paramount percentage of market,” he said when asked about his involvement in approving a WBD deal. “I mean, none of them are particularly great friends of mine. I want to do what’s right.”
Later that week, however, Trump made it apparent that he favored Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros., saying that it was “imperative that CNN be sold” as part of any deal for the media giant. While WBD would spin off CNN in a separate company as part of the Netflix merger, Paramount is proposing to buy all of Warner’s assets.
On top of that, Ellison has said he’s had “great conversations” with Trump about his plan to combine CNN – which Trump has long reviled as “fake news” – with CBS News, which Ellison recently put under the control of anti-woke culture warrior Bari Weiss.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Ellison “offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.” All the while, the Ellisons have also brought on Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner as an investor in the Warner Bros. bid.
“I think any deal, it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately, but I don’t think the people that are running that company right now and running CNN, which is a very dishonest group of people,” Trump declared on Wednesday. “I don’t think that should be allowed to continue.”
On top of that, Ellison and his father have gone out of their way to do damage control with the White House over the 60 Minutes interview that has sparked the president’s ire.
According to the New York Post, the younger Ellison has “told people close to Trump he was unaware of the broadcast until the day it ran, as was Jeff Shell, president of Paramount Skydance, and Weiss.” One source added that “[t]hey’re saying those guys went rogue and when Paramount Skydance found out about it, they were caught flatfooted.”
Based on Tuesday’s Truth Social tirade, it looks like the Ellisons will need to do some more pandering.
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