The $16 million settlement agreed to by CBS News and President Donald Trump is not as troubling as it might, in the most extreme case, have been: It did not include an apology.
That is, perhaps, the only solace believers in the First Amendment can take in the news, broken early July 2, that the lawsuit filed by the President has come to an end. Trump’s suit was premised on the idea that the news network had deceptively edited a “60 Minutes” appearance by Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential run. Since his second term began, Trump has been seeking to neuter the press, wringing a similar settlement out of ABC News after an inaccurate statement made on-air by George Stephanopoulos and reshaping the White House Briefing Room to be stocked with right-wing podcasters and content creators, instead of journalists. The CBS settlement is just one front in a war with far-reaching and troubling implications not just for journalists but for anyone who values living in a free society.
On the merits, the case against CBS seems ludicrously weak. CBS has said the interview was edited for time; besides that, the First Amendment guarantees a certain amount of discretion as to how to present news. Or perhaps it would have seemed to guarantee that. No one can know how a trial might have played out; Paramount, which owns CBS News, is in the process of a merger with Skydance that at once promises to bail out a flailing studio and also requires approval by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. As has happened so frequently in his still-only-just-begun second term, Trump had leverage, and used it in order to deliver a result favorable to him, and one that weakens the institutions that stand in the way of his agenda. There’s been plenty of collateral damage: Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” resigned, and Wendy McMahon, the news organization’s head and a defender of the newsmagazine show, was forced out.
The $16 million — to be paid to a future Trump presidential library — is substantial, but seems almost beside the point. The real message is that media coverage that does not serve Trump will be placed under new scrutiny by an Administration that insists upon utter dominance of every sphere of American life. Most every major broadcast news outlet is owned by a corporation that may at some point have business before the federal government. Can a journalist at ABC News (owned by Disney) or NBC News (Comcast) report freely on Trump, or on his political opponents, without now fearing a retribution Trump’s White House has proven it is willing and able to carry out? The answer is obvious, and frightening.
Trump’s autocratic impulses are playing out across government, across academia — where he has used levers his predecessors might not have dreamed of to effectively shatter institutions of higher learning — and across the way we share and consume information. If it hadn’t been a report on Kamala Harris that Trump saw as overly favorable by mere dint of its existence, the mechanism Trump used to muzzle the news media would have been something else; the past months have shown us a renewed and dizzying shamelessness when it comes to Trump’s ability to invent justifications for his actions.
We are at a moment of unique peril as the Presidency subsumes every structure and institution within this country; the news media is hardly alone in finding itself unable to fight back effectively. One might hope that the end result of this sorry CBS News episode would be a sort of banding-together, whereby journalists and news organizations renewed their commitment to covering Trump aggressively. While journalists themselves will surely do their very best, the companies they serve seem eager to bend the knee, seemingly convinced that this period we are living through is a temporary moment from which we’ll all recover and not the beginning of a radical shift in how power is wielded in this country. Perhaps all we can do is hope that they’re right.