The lawyers for President Trump and Paramount, the father of CBS News, will begin mediation on Wednesday on a lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump that the batteries “60 minutes” or deceptively editing an interview with their 2024 Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.
Legal experts have called the suit without a base and an easy victory for CBS. But Paramount is the entrance of the conversations prepared to make a deal.
At the April 18 meeting, the Paramount Board described acceptable financial terms for a possible agreement with the President, according to three people with knowledge of internal discussions. The amounts of exact dollars remain an uncle, but the move of the Board erases a path for an extrajudicial resolution.
Shari Redstone, the company’s controlling shareholder, said it favors the case of resolving the case. She is scheduled to receive an important payment day at a pending sale of Paramount to a Hollywood study, Skydance, which requires the Trump administration signature. Any agreement would ultimately require the approval of the Board, and Mrs. Redstone told the Board that the deliberations related to the demand are being challenged.
Paramount declined to comment.
Paramount’s interest in the solution has dismayed the CBS news division, in particular the staff of “60 minutes”, the most popular weekly news program in the country. Four days after the meeting of the Board of April 18, the executive producer of the program, Bill Owens, announced abruptly that he would resign, citing the invasion in his journalistic figure and saying that Paramont “has finished with me.”
The resignation of Mr. Owens sent shock waves through the media industry, which has faced a series of legal and rhetorical attacks of the president. Trump has brought demands against television networks, threatened to rescind the transmission licenses and prohibited reporters from the disadvantaged media of the White House events.
ABC News, owned by Walt Disney Company, agreed in December to pay $ 16 million to resolve a defamation case presented by Trump that many media lawyers considered frivolous. That decision foreshadowed a series of other high -profile settlements with Trump for corporate law firm and the main universities.
Within the “60 minutes”, Mr. Owens has told confidants that he felt a growing Paramount pressure in recent months. In January, Mrs. Redstone complained to CBS executives about a “60 -minute” segment about the war between Israel and Hamas. Subsequently, a veteran CBS news executive was asked to check the “60 minutes” pieces that touched the Middle East or the Trump administration.
Althegh did not cancel the segments as a result, Mr. Owens was upset by the move. “60 Minute” has long attributed an unusual degree of autonomy from the rest of the CBS news division, and Mr. Owens told his staff that the additional review layer could create “a really slippery slope.”
The tensions shot again on April 13, when “60 minutes” issued pieces in the efforts of Mr. Trump to Annexar Greenland and his performance of the Oval office with Volodymyr Zensky, the president of Ukraine. The president reacted angry, publishing on social networks that “60 minutes”, CBS and Paramount must be punished “for their illegal and illegal behavior.”
Mrs. Redstone was unstable for that position, and requested an informative session of George Cheeks, the Paramount executive co -presidences, about politically sensitive segments that “60 minutes” had planned for the rest of their season, which ends or ends.
Mrs. Redstone expressed concern about some of those segments, and encouraged Mr. Cheeks to make sure the news division was fair with the coverage issues, Althegh “60 minutes” did not make changes as a result of Heralks, people said. Bloomberg and Semafor previously reported on the conversations of Mrs. Redstone with Paramount’s leadership.
By then, Mr. Owens had concluded that it would be illenable for him to remain in “60 minutes” in the long term. The investigation of Mrs. Redstone on future segments led Mr. Owens to consider announcing her resignation sooner rather than later, partly to attract the attention of the public and persuade Paramount executives to refrain from entrusting with “60 minutes,” said people.
Hello, in an emotional meeting last Tuesday, the duration that the correspondent Lesley Stahl choked and Mr. Owens could barely get his words. “It is clear that I have become the problem: I am the problem of the corporation,” he said, according to an audio recording. Mr. Owens regretted “having less” and seemed to refer to Mrs. Redstone’s request. “In a million years,” he said, “the corporation did not know what arose.”
The frustration in “60 minutes” on its corporate owners reached the surface at the end of its Sunday night broadcast. In a surprising segment, the correspondent Scott Pelley, a former presenter of “CBS Evening News” and a friend of Mr. Owens, told the spectators that his boss had resigned because he heard “he felt that he lost the independence required by honey journalism.” Mr. Pelley called Paramount by name.
Within the offices of Midtown Manhattan of the program, concerns about interference have not disappeared.
This week, some producers of “60 minutes” expressed their group that corporate supervisors could potentially interfere with an upcoming segment about conflicts between the main law firms and the Trump administration, according to two people with knowledge stations.
That segment, organized by Mr. Pelley, could be broadcast as soon as Sunday.