The Scoop
President Donald Trump spent the better part of the past year in a legal battle with CBS News and its parent company, Paramount.
Now, having taken the network for $16 million, he may soon be back on its airwaves.
The White House is in talks with 60 Minutes about conducting an upcoming interview with Trump, four people with knowledge of the discussions told Semafor. The White House communications team had initially considered scheduling the interview last Friday while Trump was in New York for a speech at the United Nations and the Ryder Cup. CBS staff had already begun preparing for the sitdown, which would have been conducted by correspondent Bill Whitaker, but the timeline for the potential interview shifted because of Trump’s schedule.
The network and administration are continuing to discuss an upcoming sitdown on the show, and the White House has told CBS it wants the conversation to be aired unedited, the sources said. Both CBS News and the White House declined to comment.
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In July, Paramount agreed to settle a lawsuit with the Trump 2024 campaign over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. The Trump team had argued that the interview had been misleadingly edited, saying it amounted to election interference. CBS disputed the charge, and many legal experts said the lawsuit was winnable for the network. But amid the pending merger of its parent company, Paramount owner Shari Redstone advocated to the company’s board for the settlement, which did not include an apology for the interview.
Over the last year, the Trump team has been successful at extracting some editorial concessions from CBS News. As part of the July settlement, the network agreed to release full transcripts of future 60 Minutes interviews. And earlier this year, CBS News changed its editorial rules following complaints from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s team over an interview on the network’s Sunday show, Face The Nation. Following the criticism, CBS News announced that it would only air unedited interviews on Face the Nation going forward.
The potential sitdown also comes as the network’s new ownership is telegraphing that it wants to change CBS in a way that could align the network more closely with values shared by conservatives: Paramount’s new owners at Skydance are expected to soon announce the acquisition of the center-right digital publication The Free Press, and its founder Bari Weiss is expected to be tapped as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Max’s view
An interview with the sitting president is a valuable journalistic opportunity that almost any news network would agree to. But an interview with Trump on 60 Minutes also presents tremendous risk for a news organization that has already been the focus of the president’s ire and is now trying to maintain its credibility without provoking him again.
CBS News staff have been bracing for changes as the network’s leaders — and some of its most respected journalists — have exited amid editorial disagreements with the parent company. Earlier this year, former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens announced he was resigning, saying he did not believe he had true journalistic independence anymore. CBS News president Wendy McMahon was similarly forced out of the network, saying she and the company were not journalistically aligned. Hiring Weiss and choosing not to bring back comedian Stephen Colbert, whose late night show airs on CBS as well, have also been taken as signs internally that the network is hoping to play a bit nicer with the political right.
While the moves have angered left-of-center critics, they have seemed to placate the administration. CBS seems to have escaped FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s regulatory eye for now, but the threat of future action has clearly spooked the network, which said it was cooperating with his investigation into whether CBS News engaged in “news distortion” in its editing of the Harris interview last year.
The interview, and its format, would also present Trump with the opportunity to take a victory lap on the airwaves of a network that recently cut him a large check. Trump has relished reminding his former legal opponents of his wins: Last week, he celebrated YouTube’s agreement to pay nearly $25 million to settle a lawsuit over its decision to suspend Trump’s account after the Capitol Hill riots on Jan. 6, 2021, by posting an AI-generated image of himself with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan holding an oversized check.