‘60 Minutes’ Said to Have Covered Up for ‘Drowsy’ Biden During Interview: Fear of Discovery Paved Way for Paramount Settlement With Trump

The matriarch of the billionaire family that, until recently, controlled Paramount Global and CBS News, Shari Redstone, is shedding more light on her push to settle President Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against “60 Minutes,” saying that going to trial could have divulged information about how “60 Minutes” producers edited a 2023 interview with President Biden during which he “seemed drowsy and had to be prodded to answer.” Mr. Biden appeared alert and coherent in the edited version of the interview broadcast on “60 Minutes.” The interviewer, Scott Pelley, also introduced the segment, explaining that the president was “tired” from “confronting so much peril” and that his tiredness had led to “his lifelong stutter creeping back in.” The interview was conducted within days of Mr. Biden’s interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel, where Mr. Hur would write in his report that Mr. Biden was so forgetful that he could not be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents because a jury would sympathize with him.On July 1 of this year, CBS agreed to pay $16 million to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit over the editing of Vice President Kamala Harris’s October 2024 interview with “60 Minutes,” which removed a “word salad” and made her sound more coherent. The settlement, which occurred just weeks before the Federal Communications Commission approved Paramount’s $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media, was cast by Democrats and left-wing journalists as a bribe to win approval from the Trump administration.Shari Redstone attends a NYC Special Screening Event of ‘We Will Dance Again’ at Temple Emanu-El on September 18, 2024, at New York City. Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Paramount+But a lengthy profile piece published by the New York Times is the first report in a mainstream outlet that acknowledges, as Ms. Redstone says, that Mr. Trump’s case against CBS — widely denounced as “baseless” and “laughable” by the establishment media — was not so “black-and-white.” Mr. Trump’s lawsuit was filed in Texas, in a federal district where there is only one judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was appointed by the then 45th president. Judge Kacsmaryk rejected CBS’s motions to dismiss the case or move the case to New York out of a deep-red portion of Texas where CBS’s lawyers likely feared the jury would be hostile to the media. Ms. Redstone says she decided settling was in CBS’s “best interest” in part due to editorial decisions made by the “60 Minutes” team that likely would have come out during the discovery process and been deeply embarrassing for CBS News, even more so than settling and appearing to appease Mr. Trump. The trial date was set for September 2026, which would have given Mr. Trump’s team plenty of time to engage in a thorough discovery process and “investigate the inner workings of CBS News,” the Times notes. Specifically, Ms. Redstone told the Times she worried about Mr. Biden’s October 2023 interview with “60 Minutes,” as she told the Times that CBS News staffers informed her the 46th president “seemed drowsy and had to be prodded to answer,” and that those moments were edited out.CBS News has been denounced by President Trump for its editing of the ’60 Minutes’ interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. CBS NewsThat editing, she fretted, would be used by Mr. Trump’s team to accuse the network of covering up for Mr. Biden and demonstrating a pattern — one that culminated in the October 2024 Harris interview — of favorably editing interviews with Democrats to make them sound more coherent and in command than they did in real life.Ms. Redstone told the Times that the decision to settle “was never as black-and-white as people assumed.”An unnamed person at CBS News who saw the footage of the Biden interview disputed Ms. Redstone’s characterization and said Mr. Biden “gave some typically circuitous answers, but he never had to be prodded.”A former CBS News reporter, Catherine Herridge, told the Daily Mail in May that due to the multiple cuts in the 2023 Biden interview, it should be examined to determine whether CBS deceptively edited it. Ousted: Executive Producer Bill Owens of ’60 Minutes’ Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesCBS News did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication.The Times reported that CBS News executives’ refusal to release a complete transcript of the Harris interview — even though CBS’s CEO, George Cheeks, thought they had nothing to hide — was a “fateful” decision that led to Mr. Trump suing. Ms. Redstone also told the Times that she thought Mr. Trump’s criticism of CBS News was exaggerated. However, she voiced frustration with what she felt was an anti-Israel bias at the network, including at “60 Minutes.” In January, she criticized a “60 Minutes” story about America’s support for Israel, which the American Jewish Committee said was “shockingly one-sided.”Ms. Redstone said after watching the segment, she determined, “We needed more balance.”President Trump denounces CBS News in a conversation with Dan Bongino. Rumble“Part of me thought, maybe Trump could accomplish what I never got done,” she added.After that story aired and Ms. Redstone expressed her frustration, Mr. Cheeks appointed a veteran producer, Susan Zirinsky, to vet “60 Minutes” scripts for fairness. This is standard practice for sensitive stories at broadcast TV news divisions. But “60 Minutes” staffers are famously resistant to any interference in its operations, even from senior CBS News management, which, on paper, oversees them. In April, the show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, announced his resignation, saying he had lost the ability to make independent decisions for the show. He told the staff that “it’s clear the company is done with me,” which was seen as his communicating that Paramount was trying to appease Mr. Trump. However, by the time Mr. Owens resigned, Ms. Redstone had reportedly unsuccessfully pushed to have him fired for the “60 Minutes” story on Israel. Executives may also have been frustrated with Mr. Owens over the months-long refusal to release the raw footage of the Harris interview, which CBS did only after the FCC ordered it to. Scott Pelley denounces President Trump during his commencement speech at Wake Forest University. Wake Forest UniversityAnd perhaps most importantly, it was under his watch that “60 Minutes” distributed preview clips of the Harris interview to lesser CBS News platforms (“Face the Nation” and CBSNews.com) in which Ms. Harris gave different answers to the same question, compared to what ultimately aired on “60 Minutes.” Had these clips not been distributed, there would have been no controversy and no Trump lawsuit. Despite the media speculation that Ms. Redstone pushed to settle Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, which she initially did not see as a serious threat, to secure the FCC’s approval of the Skydance deal, she said she saw the matters as unrelated. However, she admitted to the Times that she did not entirely ignore the possibility that the lawsuit might lead the FCC to delay the deal long enough that Skydance backed out. Ms. Redstone also addressed one big lingering question about the deal: whether Skydance made a side deal during the settlement process to air $20 million worth of conservative advertisements free of charge. Paramount has denied any knowledge of such a deal. And an unnamed lawyer for Skydance reportedly communicated to Ms. Redstone that reports of a side deal were “unmitigated bulls—,” but then asked her not to repeat the denial.The Federal Communication Commission commissioner, Brendan Carr, testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s communications and technology subcommittee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesHowever, publicly, Skydance has not refuted the reports. It has merely stated that it had no part in the settlement negotiations and that it complied with anti-bribery laws.Ms. Redstone says she hopes it is not true that Skydance made a side deal.

‘60 Minutes’ Said to Have Covered Up for ‘Drowsy’ Biden During Interview: Fear of Discovery Paved Way for Paramount Settlement With Trump

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