Tag: Scott Pelley

Despite a shameful ‘60 Minutes’ settlement, the Paramount-Skydance merger is not a sure thing

Shari Redstone speaking at a Committee to Protect Journalists event. Photo (cc) 2022 by CPJ photos.

Given how long negotiations were dragged out, there was some reason to hope that Paramount Global wouldn’t give in and settle Donald Trump’s bogus lawsuit claiming that “60 Minutes” had deceptively edited an interview with Kamala Harris last October.

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In the end, Trump got what he wanted. Paramount, CBS’s parent company, will settle the suit for $16 million. If you’re looking for one tiny reason to be hopeful, the settlement did not come with an apology. In agreeing to pay off Trump, Paramount’s major owner, Shari Redstone, will now presumably find smooth sailing through the regulatory waters in selling her company to Skydance Media. Skydance, in turn, is headed by David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a friend of Trump’s.

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik has all the details. What’s clear is that this may well be the end of CBS News as a serious news organization. Just the possibility of a settlement has brought about the resignations of top executives as well as criticism from “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley. As recently as Monday, media reporter Oliver Darcy revealed that all seven “60 Minutes” correspondents had sent a message to their corporate overlords demanding that it stand firm. Murrow weeps, etc.

What I want to note, briefly, is that there are still two complications that Paramount and Skyline must contend with before wedded bliss can ensue.

The first is a threat by U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to launch an investigation into whether the payoff amounts to an illegal bribe. Given that every legal and journalistic expert who’s looked at the case believes the editing of the Harris interview was ordinary and unremarkable (among other things, “60 Minutes” edited out a clip of Harris complaining about her hay fever), that investigation might yield some headlines at least.

“Paramount appears to be attempting to appease the Administration in order to secure merger approval,” the three said in a May press release issued by Warren’s office. They added: “If Paramount officials make these concessions in a quid pro quo arrangement to influence President Trump or other Administration officials, they may be breaking the law.”

The second is a threatened shareholder lawsuit by the Freedom of the Press Foundation. In a May statement, the organization’s director of advocacy, Seth Stern, cited the three senators’ possible investigation and said this:

Corporations that own news outlets should not be in the business of settling baseless lawsuits that clearly violate the First Amendment and put other media outlets at risk. A settlement of Trump’s meritless lawsuit may well be a thinly veiled effort to launder bribes through the court system.

In this morning’s newsletter from CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, the foundation is reported to be moving ahead with its plans: “The group’s lawyers are huddling today, I’m told. A spokesperson said ‘Paramount’s spineless decision to settle Trump’s patently unconstitutional lawsuit is an insult to the First Amendment and to the journalists and viewers of “60 Minutes.” It’s a dark day for Paramount and for press freedom.’”

The Paramount settlement follows Disney’s disastrous and unnecessary $15 million settlement of a suit brought by Trump over a minor wording error by ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos in describing the verdict against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll civil case. Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found to have “raped” Carroll, whereas the technical legal term was “sexual abuse.”

Trump’s claim failed on two grounds: What Stephanopoulos said was substantially true, and there was no evidence that the anchor had deliberately or recklessly mischaracterized the outcome of the case. But no matter. Disney settled anyway.

So far, at least, Gannett is holding firm in Trump’s suit against The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer over a survey that showed Trump trailing Harris in the Buckeye Hawkeye State (which he ended up winning easily) several days before the 2024 election.

Correction: Like the great Boston Brahmin writer Cleveland Amory, I regarded “the West” as anything west of Dedham. So, yes, Iowa is the Hawkeye State. I’m fixing that here and in Tuesday’s item as well.

It’s all about ratings, so Scott Pelley’s departure was probably inevitable

Scott Pelley. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t often watch the network evening newscasts. But when I do, I watch the “CBS Evening News” with Scott Pelley, which strikes me as a little more intelligent than the competition — not to mention more willing to call out President Trump’s falsehoods, as Margaret Sullivan recently observed in The Washington Post.

So I was disappointed to learn that Pelley has been booted from the anchor chair and will return full-time to “60 Minutes.” The early breathless reporting by the New York Post turned out to be overblown. As Dylan Byers reports at CNN.com, Pelley’s office was cleared out at his request, and he’ll continue to anchor until a replacement is found, which suggests that he’s being treated with some level of respect.

But ratings are ratings. And with CBS in third place and sliding, Pelley’s departure was perhaps inevitable — although unless CBS has an animatronic Walter Cronkite waiting in the wings, it’s hard to imagine the network will come up with someone better.

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Why the midterms could be disastrous for the planet

PresidentAlfredPreviously published at WGBHNews.org.

Monday’s broadcast of “The CBS Evening News” began on a portentous note. “Good evening,” said anchor Scott Pelley. “Melting glaciers, rising sea levels, higher temperatures. If you think someone’s trying to tell us something, someone just did.”

Pelley’s introduction was followed by a report on the latest study by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. According to The Washington Post, the panel found that global warming is now “irreversible,” and that drastic steps must be taken to reduce the use of fossil fuels in order to prevent worst-case scenarios from becoming a reality.

No matter. Before the night was over, Americans had turned their backs on the planet. By handing over the Senate to Mitch McConnell and his merry band of Republicans, voters all but ensured that no progress will be made on climate change during the next two years — and that even some tenuous steps in the right direction may be reversed.

At Vox, Brad Plumer noted that Tuesday’s Alfred E. Neuman moment came about despite more than $80 million in campaign spending by environmentalists and despite natural disasters that may be related to climate change, such as the unusual destructiveness of Hurricane Sandy and the ongoing drought in the West.

“Which means that if anything’s going to change, it may have to happen outside Congress,” Plumer wrote, adding that “the 2014 election made clear that Washington, at least, isn’t going to be much help on climate policy anytime soon.”

Not much help? That would be the optimistic view. Because as Elana Schor pointed out in Politico, Republicans and conservative Democrats may now have a veto-proof majority to move ahead on the Keystone XL pipeline. The project, which would bring vast quantities of dirty oil from Canada into the United States, would amount to “the equivalent of adding six million new cars to the road,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben said in an interview with “Democracy Now” earlier this year.

The problem is that though Americans say they care about climate change, they don’t care about it very much.

In September, the Pew Research Center reported the results of a poll that showed 61 percent of the public believed there is solid evidence that the earth has been warming, and that 48 percent rated climate change as “a major threat” — well behind the Islamic State and nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.

Moreover, whereas Democrats registered 79 percent on “solid evidence” and 68 percent on “major threat,” Republicans scored just 37 percent and 25 percent. The Republican political leadership, anxious to keep its restive right-wing base happy, has every incentive to keep pursuing its science-bashing obstructionist path.

One possible solution to this mess was proposed in the New York Times a few days ago by David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan of Duke University: get rid of the midterm elections altogether by extending the terms of representatives from two to four years and by changing senatorial terms from six years to four or eight.

As Schanzer and Sullivan noted, presidential election years are marked by high turnout across a broad spectrum of the electorate. By contrast, the midterms attract a smaller, whiter, older, more conservative cohort that is bent on revenge for the setbacks it suffered two years earlier. (According to NBC News, turnout among those 60 and older Tuesday was 37 percent, compared to just 12 percent for those under 30.)

“The realities of the modern election cycle,” they wrote, “are that we spend almost two years selecting a president with a well-developed agenda, but then, less than two years after the inauguration, the midterm election cripples that same president’s ability to advance that agenda.”

There is, of course, virtually no chance of such common-sense reform happening as long as one of our two major parties benefits from it not happening.

The consequences of that inaction can be devastating. According to The Washington Post’s account of this week’s U.N. report, “some impacts of climate change will ‘continue for centuries,’ even if all emissions from fossil-fuel burning were to stop.”

Sadly, we just kicked the can down the road for at least another two years.

Correction: This commentary originally said that CBS News’ report on climate change was aired on Tuesday rather than Monday.