Good day all. Shortly before the election it looked like Skydance was about to buy Paramount and all it’s subsidiaries. Then the 60 minutes “Interview” with Kamala Harris came out and it was found that 60 minutes heavily edited the video to try and make Harris not look like a complete moron.
When it came out what 60 minutes had done, President Trump’s team filed a $10 billion dollar suit against CBS. It was later expanded to $20 billion and Paramount was added as a defendant. Because of this lawsuit and that the evidence that CBS News and 60 Minutes “Cooked the books” as it were, the Skydance deal is in serious jeopardy.
Since Shari Redstone wants to sell, she has told the lawyers to start working on some sort of settlement. Paramount Management has also started looking very carefully at the CBS News division. This led the Executive producer of 60 minutes, Bill Owens, to resign in a huff. (Probably before he was fired) Now it looks like the CBS staffers are actively trying to sink the deal. Here are the details from Fox News:
Pressure is mounting on Paramount Global from both the inside and outside as it considers settling a high-stakes lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump.
Lawyers for Trump and Paramount entered mediation last week, signaling the company’s potential willingness to resolve the whopping $20 billion suit filed by Trump accusing CBS News of election interference over its handling of the “60 Minutes” interview last year with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
The recent history of these lawsuits by President Trump against news agencies that have been flat out lying has thrown a scare into corporate management. Why? Because the actions of the various News divisions were so blatant that if these cases went to trial, President Trump would win. This is one reason that ABC settled their case. If the CBS/Paramount case were to go to trial, the Skydance deal is dead. If President Trump wins the suit, then Paramount is also dead. There is no way they could pay a $20 billion dollar judgment. The company is only worth about $8 billion. That is the main reason that the Paramount board wants to settle.
A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Senators Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., made a direct plea to Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, to not settle the lawsuit, saying it would be a “grave mistake.”
“Rewarding Trump with tens of millions of dollars for filing this bogus lawsuit will not cause him to back down on his war against the media and a free press,” Sanders and the Democrats wrote to Redstone on Tuesday. “It will only embolden him to shakedown, extort and silence CBS and other media outlets that have the courage to report about issues that Trump may not like.”
I don’t think those two have grasped the situation. They might like to think that the Media belongs to the Democrat Party and that they truly believe the rules don’t apply to them, the Media corporations are a business that exists to make money for their shareholders. They aren’t a propaganda arm for the Democrats, even if most of the staffers think they are.
Their message may fall on deaf ears as it was previously reported that Redstone was in favor of settling the lawsuit in hopes of paving the way for Paramount’s planned merger with Skydance Media and preventing potential retribution by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has the authority to halt the multibillion-dollar transaction.
I suspect that Redstone and the corporate lawyers took a look at the lawsuit and came to the conclusion that they really didn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s in their best interests to figure out a way to get out from under this mess that the CBS News division put them in.
Redstone not only wanted to reportedly “keep tabs” on upcoming “60 Minutes” segments involving Trump, she reportedly urged CBS execs to delay any sensitive reporting on Trump until after the merger deal closed with Skydance. That led to the abrupt resignation of “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, who cited his inability to maintain editorial independence.
As mentioned above, Bill Owens was probably going to be fired if he hadn’t resigned. It was his actions that led to the lawsuit and that pig headed moonbat was doubling down on stupid before he decided to bravely run away. As for the remaining staff, they basically ignored the instructions from the grown up in the C suites.
On the contrary, “60 Minutes” aired a highly critical report last Sunday about Trump’s executive order targeting Democratic law firms who’ve attacked him, the show’s staff essentially thumbing their noses at the corporate honcho.
“Get out of our way and let us keep working how we have been for decades,” one CBS News staffer previously told Fox News Digital.
The story, which I didn’t see, was probably about President Trump revoking the security clearances that these law firms have. Why they have them is another question. One of the Obama judges decided that she has absolute authority over the issuance of these clearances and ordered them reinstated. That is another story all together. The story here is what amounts to the rank and file staffers outright refusing the instructions from management.
Journalists on “60 Minutes” as well as “CBS Evening News” directly linked Paramount’s effort to settle Trump’s lawsuit to the company’s merger plans while giving an on-air salute to Owens.
But wait, there’s more!
But it’s no longer just stars from CBS’ news division speaking out. “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert called out his corporate bosses Tuesday night in an exchange with his guest, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
“There are reports that the owner of this company called the president – or called the chairman of this company – and said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got to get the news to lay off any bad Trump stories.’ And the word is that that was not passed on to the news division, I’m happy to say,” the CBS star told Maddow.
There are questions on whether or not this lawsuit has any merit of course, but that for the legal beagles to work on, not me. Besides, it isn’t just the lawsuit that Redstone and Paramount are worried about, it’s the FCC as well.
Earlier this year, FCC Chair Brendan Carr ordered CBS News to hand over the unedited transcript of the interview as part of its investigation into whether the network violated the FCC’s “news distortion” policy after a complaint was filed. CBS had refused to release the unedited transcript when the controversy first began.
If you watch the unedited footage, it’s damning for both CBS and Harris. It shows that 60 minutes intentionally edited the video and in many cases the editing was pretty extreme, to make is seem that Harris wasn’t the incompetent boob she actually is. Add to this 60 Minutes history of editing interviews to either make the person being interviewed look like a saint or evil incarnate.
I have a suspicion that 60 minutes is not long for this world, at least with it’s current on and off air personnel. Most of the on air “Talent” make Joe Biden look like a spring chicken. The back office types appear to be in a full blown mutiny against management. I think they all understand that if the deal with Skydance goes through, they’re probably going to lose their jobs. Skydance can’t afford the loose cannons of CBS News.
If the deal falls through, look for Shari Redstone to clean house. CBS News and 60 minutes have thrown what credibility they had into the trash, all due to being in the terminal stages of Trump Derangement Syndrome. One way or another, major structural changes are coming to CBS.
Thatisall
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