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.
“I was disappointed, but I wasn’t surprised,” he said. “Big billionaire business people make decisions about money. We could always hope that they will make an exception when it comes to freedom of the press, but it wasn’t to be.
“Trump knew if he put the pressure on and threatened and just held that they would fold, because there’s too much money on the table,” he added. “Trump is now forcing a whole news organization to pay millions of dollars for doing something protected by the Constitution — which is, of course, free and independent reporting. Now, you take today’s sell-out. And that’s what it was: It was a sell-out to extortion by the President. Who can now say where all this ends?”
Rather then pointed to the larger issue of what this means for the United States as a democracy. “It has to do with not just journalism, but more importantly, with the country as a whole,” he said. “What kind of country we’re going to have, what kind of country we’re going to be. If major news organizations continue to kneel before power and stop trying to hold the powerful accountable, then we all lose.
“And then big time law firms have been settling right and left, kneeling the same way,” he said. “Big universities doing the same. Trump is extorting what he wants out of them. Now he’s extorting what he wants out of news organizations. So when I say, ‘Where does this go?’ What are the effects on journalism as a whole?”
Asked what advice he might give the folks at CBS News and “60 Minutes,” Rather humbly said it’s not his place — but that they already know “in their hearts, in their very being, the best things to do. I will say that, I do expect them to fully double down now on whatever great reporting they’re allowed to do.”
In his more than 60 years as a journalist, Rather said he’s never seen the profession face the kind of challenges it’s now up against. “Journalism has had its trials and tribulations before, and it takes courage to just soldier on,” he said. “Keep trying, keep fighting. It takes guts to do that. And I know the people at CBS News, and particularly those at ’60 Minutes,’ they’ll do their dead level best under these circumstances. But the question is what this development and the message it sends to us. And that’s what I’m trying to concentrate on.”