Trump ’60 Minutes’ Lawsuit Threatens Entertainment Deal of the Millennium

President Donald Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS Broadcasting over the selective editing of a 60 Minutes interview last fall with then-candidate Kamala Harris threatens to derail one of the biggest media and entertainment deals of all time, the $8 billion merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global, the parent corporation of CBS.

As many people know, 60 Minutes recorded the Harris interview just weeks before the election and then edited portions of it to make certain of Harris’s answers, and one in particular concerning Israel, sound smoother and more polished.

Trump’s lawyers call this nothing short of election interference. Needless to say, CBS disagrees and has filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that nothing it did in the course of recording, editing, and airing the Harris interview violates the law.

As critical as I often am of the wilder excesses of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the inability of many of his enemies to put forward a more eloquent critique than “he’s a fascist,” I do not agree with the lawsuit against CBS. Was it dishonest for 60 Minutes to rework the interview to put the candidate that it wanted to win in the best possible light? Did the network blur the line between journalism and PR? Were its actions shabby? Undoubtedly so. But there is no law that says you can’t record an interview and then edit it as you see fit, as long as you avoid any libel or copyright infringements. The First Amendment says what it means and means what it says.

In seeking to wring $20 billion from CBS, and maybe cripple the corporation, Trump has only emboldened the more hysterical critics who try ceaselessly to paint him as an autocrat and a bully. He has not discouraged the drift of our media toward the kind of timid, lawyer-controlled entity depicted in Michael Mann’s 1999 movie The Insider.

As you will recall, that outstanding film took viewers inside the 60 Minutes boardroom at a time when in-house counsel at CBS wanted the show to back down from airing an explosive interview with Ph.D. research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, because, as producer Lowell Bergman lays out in a memorable scene, the legal fallout might endanger or scuttle the then-pending CBS-Westinghouse merger, which ultimately came to fruition in 1996.

Life imitates art. Mann’s message has never been more relevant. In The Insider’s brief prologue, 60 Minutes anchor Mike Wallace, played by Christopher Plummer, nearly comes to blows with a Hezbollah leader who presumes to tell Wallace where he can sit during their interview. Apart from the spectacle of grown men becoming livid with rage over seating arrangements, the scene impresses viewers with the sheer hubris of American media journalists in a foreign country.

Wallace’s conduct leaves nothing to the imagination. We’re the American media. Get it? First Amendment. Free speech. We can do whatever we want. Don’t mess with us. We call the shots here. Then, when the action of the film rotates stateside, we see the bitter truth that such familiar boasts conceal. Mann parts the curtains on the behind-the-scenes machinations that make the operations of a U.S. media network—the supposed epitome of independent journalism in action—subject to all kinds of constraints, forcing it to operate in a culture of lawsuit-driven fear.

Today, the election is over, Trump won both the electoral and the popular vote, and it is neither necessary nor politically prudent for him to pursue a grudge fight against a network that everyone knows engaged in selective editing on behalf of the candidate it wanted to win. Media bias sucks, but if people file lawsuits every time that a media entity engages in spin or crosses the line between reporting and PR, then the tendency that Al Pacino’s Lowell Bergman objects to so strenuously in one of The Insider’s many memorable scenes will be an even more common reality. News shows might as well fire their experienced journalists and replace them with lawyers versed in tortious interference.

If he pursues this grudge fight, Trump will have also needlessly ceded ground on one of the most important issues that he likes to think differentiates his side from that of the woke Left. Even now, many Americans do not appreciate the latter’s virtue-signaling authoritarianism, its self-righteousness, and its often-demonstrated hostility to free speech. No matter how bitter he may still feel about the Harris interview, it would be a tragedy if Trump emulated the worst tactics of the enemy. It is well past time to move on and deal with the real challenges facing America and the world.