The headline from our friends at the Wall Street Journal could not be more blunt. It read: “Mediator Proposes $20 Million Settlement in Trump’s CBS Suit: Potential package would include a donation, legal costs, and public service announcements.” (RELATED: FCC Pulls a ‘60 Minutes’ on ‘60 Minutes’)
The story said, among other things, this:
A mediator has proposed that President Trump and Paramount Global settle his lawsuit over a CBS News “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris for $20 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
The proposal would include a $17 million donation to Trump’s presidential foundation or museum, the people said. It would also include millions more in legal fees and public service announcements on Paramount-owned networks to fight antisemitism, the people said.
Notably — say again, notably — the WSJ reported this:
Trump’s team has said it wants an apology — something Paramount isn’t prepared to do, according to people familiar with the situation. It couldn’t be learned whether Trump’s team is still seeking an apology.
Settlement talks are still fluid and an agreement might not be reached.
And right there is the age-old, been-there-done-that problem seemingly eternally encountered by public officials when they make a mistake. Namely, journalists refuse both to own up to their mistake, and then, having made that refusal, go on to refuse to apologize for it. (RELATED: The Agony Of 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley)
For those looking elsewhere, the essence here is also described by the WSJ:
Trump alleged in October that the network committed election interference by deceitfully editing a “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic presidential candidate Harris, making her sound better. The lawsuit ultimately sought $20 billion in damages. CBS has said it didn’t doctor her comments, but rather aired a more succinct version of her response.
Note well that last sentence. Again, it reads: “CBS has said it didn’t doctor her comments, but rather aired a more succinct version of her response.”
Got that? Editing a TV interview to make your candidate look good is nothing more than having “aired a more succinct version of her response.”
Right.
The real problem here is that American journalism has slowly transformed itself from, to borrow from that old (very old!) TV police drama classic Dragnet, “the facts, just the facts” …. to, bluntly put, a “what can this or that theoretically neutral news outlet do that will best help the campaign and candidate at issue.”
The fact that there are media outlets that take a side in politics is neither new nor crazy. Indeed, this very publication that you are reading, The American Spectator, was created, quite openly and deliberately, in support of conservatism by our founder, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. He was not alone, either, as the earlier creation of National Review by his friend William F. Buckley, Jr. illustrates. And there were more of these media outlets, both print and eventually radio and TV, that carried the day for conservative or liberal points of view.
Whether Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and the advent of talk radio both nationally and locally, or Rupert Murdoch and later Chris Ruddy creating Fox News and Newsmax (in the latter case, full disclosure, where I am a contributor), political media has been around for a long, very long time.
But what all of those people and outlets have in common is that they make no pretense about their politics. The problem, as noted, is when a media outlet pretends to be “just the facts” journalism and reporting; “just the facts” is the last thing they are about. (Hello? Can you say New York Times?)
All of which brings us back to President Trump’s apparent looming success in his suit against CBS-Paramount.
Again, note well that paragraph from the Journal story. It read: “CBS has said it didn’t doctor her comments, but rather aired a more succinct version of her response.”
Got that? CBS wasn’t about doctoring Vice President Harris’s comments. No, the network was really about airing “a more succinct version of her response.”
Right.
Which is to say, the news behind the suit is that in the Trump view, CBS was about airing a more palatable sound byte that would please its mostly liberal audience.
The larger — much larger — problem here is that American journalism in general is loaded with “journalists” who, in fact, are really “political activists.” And their “journalism” reflects this problem routinely.
Shocking.
Not.
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