7 hours Ago By Ted Johnson
Mediation is reportedly set to start today, Donald Trump ‘s 101st day of his second term, between Trump’s legal team and that of Paramount Global , parent company of CBS, to try to resolve the president’s $20 billion lawsuit against the network over the way that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited. As Paramount Global seeks Trump administration approval of its merger with Skydance , the company is anxious to close the deal, and the lawsuit is viewed as a hang-up. The president has said that he is asking for “a lot” to settle the case.
Related Stories Donald Trump Says He’s Asking For “A Lot” To Settle CBS ‘60 Minutes’ Lawsuit ‘60 Minutes’ Does Segment Explaining Departure Of Executive Producer Bill Owens: “Paramount Began To Supervise Our Content In New Ways” There’s a reason so many at CBS News , and 60 Minutes in particular, are dismayed at the idea of a settlement: Many legal experts see Trump’s lawsuit as dubious. CBS lawyers have made that argument in their filings in the case, and a monetary settlement likely would be seen as a payoff to pave the way for eventual regulatory approval. Watch on Deadline Given the corporate intrigue and multiple regulatory strands circling the case and the merger review, the actual merits of the case often get lost.
Trump sued over a 60 Minutes interview over an answer that Harris gave to correspondent Bill Whitaker. He asked her why Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not listening to the Biden administration. Harris replied, “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.
And we’re not going to stop doing that. We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.” The second part of Harris’ answer was shown on the 60 Minutes broadcast on October 7.
The first part was shown one day earlier, in a preview segment of Face the Nation . CBS says the unedited transcript shows that 60 Minutes trimmed Harris’ answer in the interest of time, a common industry practice. Trump, though, claims the network was being deceptive to make Harris look better, to boost her electoral chances.
So, in the current environment of increased attacks on the media by the administration and others, here are six reasons that legal experts say that the Trump lawsuit is frivolous: 1) This is not a defamation case. Unlike a number of other Trump lawsuits against media outlets, this is not a case about anything that was said about him. In fact, Trump did not even participate in the 60 Minutes episode, an election special that has traditionally featured sit-down interviews with both major-party candidates.
Instead, Trump claims that 60 Minutes violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a law typically used by consumers against false advertising. CBS has argued that its editorial judgments are non-commercial, First Amendment-protected speech that falls outside the law, as well as a federal statute cited by the Trump team, the Lanham Act, also typically used in cases of false advertising. Noah Feldman, professor of law at Harvard University, wrote on Bloomberg Opinion in November, “CBS’ speech is not commercial, however.
It’s news. It doesn’t offer anything for sale. If news on a network with advertising counted as commercial speech, the First Amendment as we know it would be gutted of its most important effects.
Every newspaper with ads or a paywall would lose the appropriately high level of long-established free-speech protection.” Feldman also wrote that there was a reason the case was filed where it was, Amarillo, Texas. There is only one federal judge there, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, and he has issued a number of “extremely conservative” positions in recent years, Feldman noted.
In seeking dismissal, CBS’ legal team argues that the case is “forum shopping” and that it was the improper venue to be filed. The network’s legal team also has pointed out that Trump’s lawsuit lacks evidence to even bring a claim under the Texas law. They noted that Trump did not even present evidence that he and the other plaintiff in the case, former White House doctor Rep.
Ronny Jackson (R-TX), were consumers who “purchased or leased” CBS’ goods or services, or that they were “actually confused or misled,” or that they “detrimentally relied on any purportedly false or misleading representation.” Trump, for his part, has repeatedly defended the lawsuit. Today he called his case a “true winner,” and that the network “cheated and defraud the American people at levels never seen before in the political arena.
” His attorneys contend that Trump and Jackson were consumers who were harmed. In their complaint that the Face the Nation preview was “commercial speech calculated to attract attention to the Election Special; and the Preview ultimately promoted content that was altogether different than what Defendants advertised.” In other words, Trump’s team has contended that the Face the Nation promo for 60 Minutes represented an advertisement that falls within the Texas law.
But the clip that aired on Face the Nation was within that broadcast, not during a commercial break. 2) $20 billion in damages. Trump is seeking a whopping figure that is (a) more than double the value of the Skydance -Paramount deal; and (b) is more than was spent by all presidential, Senate, House, political parties and interest groups in the 2024 election, per the Center for Responsive Politics.
Trump’s initial lawsuit , filed in October, sought $10 billion in damages. He filed an amended lawsuit in February that doubled the figure. Such inflated claims may be a sign that a plaintiff is seeking to intimidate the other side, even if they may have a hard time proving they suffered such losses.
3) Donald Trump won the election. Trump’s initial lawsuit was centered on the claim that, by boosting Harris’ electoral prospects, 60 Minutes was harming his. But Trump went on to win the election.
CBS says that fact moots his claim of harm, and that even if the argument is that he suffered lost fundraising dollars, the damage is to the campaign, and not to Trump personally. The campaign is not a plaintiff in the case. 4) The president’s new theory of harm.
In his amended lawsuit, Trump presented a new argument for how he was hurt by the Harris segment: By airing the 60 Minutes interview, CBS “improperly diverted” viewership from his media platforms, including Truth Social. That resulted in lost consumer engagement, advertising and profits to the Trump Media and Technology Group and other holdings. CBS’ legal team has pointed out that Trump’s claims rely on “speculative assumptions” that have been rejected by courts.
But think about what it would actually take to prove that a mass of viewers decided on October 7 to turn away from Truth Social and turn on 60 Minutes . The numbers also showed that the broadcast did OK, beating other broadcast shows that evening, but it was hardly a blockbuster: that night, a Monday, 60 Minutes drew 5.7 million viewers, per Nielsen.
That’s also below the 7.4 million the show averaged through the season, when it was usually aired on Sunday night. Shares of Trump’s media company, meanwhile, actually jumped in the weeks after that 60 Minutes telecast, from $18.
39 on October 7 to $51.51 on October 29. Then, shares were on a bit of a roller-coaster in the days leading up to the election, likely impacted by Trump’s election prospects and the company’s earnings results.
For an event that caused such an alleged financial hit, Trump Media and Technology Group did not mention the 60 Minutes broadcast in its February press release reporting 2024 results, nor is it specifically cited in its annual report . Instead, losses were attributed to other factors. TMTG also is not a plaintiff in the case; Trump is.
One more note: The market cap for TMTG is around $5.3 billion, or about a quarter of Trump’s claimed damages figure. [ Disclosure: Deadline Media, LLC and more than a dozen other media outlets are defendants in a lawsuit filed by Trump Media and Technology Group, Inc.
, parent company of Truth Social, regarding reporting on the company’s financial status. ] 5) Harris’ answers. Face the Nation ran one part of Harris’ answer and 60 Minutes ran the other part.
While the former is slightly more jumbled than the latter, either answer is vague. The then-Vice President already had a reputation for giving such types of replies. Her word salads were well known, and even were the subject of a pre-election book, while her supporters embraced some of them as memes.
In short, it’s hard to see how either answer to the question, or combined together, would have suddenly shifted sentiment in the presidential contest. And Harris lost. 6) There’s the First Amendment.
“Whatever statutory causes of action Plaintiffs may devise, the First Amendment bars their attack on CBS’ editorial freedom,” CBS lawyers argued last month. They also cited case law supporting their contention that the Lanham Act and the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act do not extend to non-commercial speech, like news outlets’ editorial decisions including what material is included in a story and what is not. Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote last month, “Those cuts are protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees the press broad freedom to make editorial decisions about the content they print or air.
And laws like Texas’ are designed to prevent used car salesmen from passing off lemons to unsuspecting buyers, not to police journalism.” Think about the alternative: Any candidates upset with coverage could simply sue under a consumer law if he or she dislikes the way that a news broadcast or online post is edited, written or positioned, even those that are about their opponents. There are also plenty of much more significant examples of genuine fall campaign bombshells that didn’t lead to massive, multibillion-dollar lawsuits, like 60 Minutes II ‘s apology over a 2004 report on George W.
Bush’s military service, or Fox News’ Bret Baier’s regret for a 2016 statement that an indictment was likely to result from a federal investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The CBS legal team noted Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion in last year’s TikTok decision. “One man’s ‘covert content’ is another’s ‘editorial discretion.
’ Journalists, publishers, and speakers of all kinds routinely make less than transparent judgments about what stories to tell and how to tell them. Without question, the First Amendment has much to say about the right to make those choices.”.
