Don’t throw CBS News under the Trump bus

That vigor might be under reconsideration.

According to the Wall Street Journal, executives at Paramount, CBS’s parent company, have discussed the possibility of settling the suit as they game out “options to reduce friction with the incoming administration.” Paramount needs the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to finalize a merger with Skydance Media, producer of popular movies and TV shows. Incoming FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in December has cited concerns about the merger.

The case against panicking: Paramount hasn’t actually proposed a settlement, according to the Journal. The case for panicking: Any consideration of settling such a worthless piece of litigation is a frightening development for media in Trump’s second term. Frivolous doesn’t begin to describe Trump’s complaint — and media organizations must find better ways of headlining his manipulation of the civil justice system.

That Paramount executives would be discussing any aspect of this matter bears testament that more than 50 years after Spiro Agnew launched a historic critique of network TV news coverage, just about anything can be spun into a bona fide media controversy.

Here are the particulars of this one: On Oct. 6, CBS News’s Sunday show “Face the Nation” ran an excerpt from an interview by Bill Whitaker with Harris; the excerpt related to U.S. policy toward Israel. When Whitaker pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t listening to the United States, 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.”

The next day, “60 Minutes” showcased the Whitaker-Harris interview but used a different — and shorter — part of Harris’s response on the Netanyahu question. “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.”

Objections to the editing piled up on social media, where detractors claimed that “60 Minutes” had edited Harris’s answer to save her from embarrassment. After days of outcry, the program on Oct. 20 issued a statement: “60 Minutes gave an excerpt of our interview to Face the Nation that used a longer section of her answer than that on 60 Minutes. Same question. Same answer. But a different portion of the response,” reads the statement, which also pointed out that the shorter version on “60 Minutes” allowed the program more time for other material across the 21-minute segment.

CBS News could have avoided this distraction by releasing an unedited video and transcript of its Harris interview. To its discredit, it did not. Paramount didn’t answer questions about the case.

The question for Trump: How to maximize pressure on “60 Minutes”? One option for the grievance-prone Trump would have been to accuse the network of defamation, but that would have been a stretch even for the lawsuit-happy developer-turned-politician. The “60 Minutes” segment, after all, noted the surge in border arrivals following Trump’s first term and credited him for his resilient political base.

So, why not accuse CBS News of violating Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act? Trump himself, reasoned the complaint, is a “consumer” of “60 Minutes,” which he accused of “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion.” The gist: Trump used a statute regulating going-out-of-business sales and door-to-door solicitations, among other commercial acts, to attack a national media outlet. And he filed the suit in the Amarillo division of Texas’s northern district, where one of his nominees, Matthew Kacsmaryk, is the only district judge.

“CBS’s distortion of the 60 Minutes Interview damaged President Trump’s fundraising and support values by several billions of dollars, particularly in Texas,” reads a footnote in the Trump complaint.

The legal strategy has an antecedent in Trumpian media-bashing. In October 2019, a lawyer representing Trump sent a letter to CNN alleging that its news coverage betrayed claims by the network to practice ethical journalism — a discrepancy that amounted to a violation of the Lanham Act, which protects consumers from false advertising, according to attorney Charles Harder.

Lawyers for CBS eviscerated Trump’s suit on several grounds, including, of course, its hostility to the Constitution. “It is especially an affront to the First Amendment to impose liability under the auspices of state consumer protection law for editorial speech made in the throes of a national presidential campaign,” notes the company’s motion to dismiss the claim. A more practical objection: CBS pointed out that shortly after filing a suit blaming CBS News for election interference and for hampering his fundraising, uh … Trump won the election!

And before that election, some media outlets played right into Trump’s hands by writing headlines treating the suit as a serious thing. “Trump sues CBS over Harris ’60 Minutes’ interview,” reads an NBC News headline. Reuters: “Trump sues CBS over Kamala Harris ’60 Minutes’ interview.” Both of those are 100 percent factual and also 100 percent lazy. CNN showed other outlets how it’s done: “Trump sues CBS over ‘60 Minutes’ interview with Harris. Legal experts call it ‘frivolous and dangerous.’”

My offering: “Trump continues attacks on media with suit against CBS News for editing.”

Stepping back from the nitty-gritty, all this madness comes courtesy of conglomeration. CBS News may be a significant media brand, but it’s something of a pip-squeak under the Paramount Global corporate umbrella, which includes CBS, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Paramount+ and Pluto TV. It sits on a list of about a thousand Paramount Global subsidiaries itemized in the company’s annual report. An entity that sprawling is bound to have conflicting imperatives before the federal government, and according to the Journal, executives at Paramount and Skydance have concluded that “Trump’s dissatisfaction with CBS News will make the [merger] review tougher than they anticipated, and that they’ll likely need to offer concessions to win approval.”

Fine: Spin off some property or other. Make some hollow corporate pledge about the merged entity. But do not settle this case. Doing so would be even more of a capitulation than ABC News’s decision to settle over a segment on a jury’s finding that Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. And if things keep trending this way, people may start losing trust in the reporting of very large media conglomerates.