Lawyers for President Trump and Paramount, the parent of CBS News, are set to begin mediation on Wednesday over a lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that accuses “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview with his 2024 Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.
Legal experts have called the suit baseless and an easy victory for CBS. But Paramount is entering the talks prepared to make a deal.
In an April 18 meeting, the Paramount board outlined acceptable financial terms for a potential settlement with the president, according to three people with knowledge of the internal discussions. The exact dollar amounts remain unclear, but the board’s move clears a path for an out-of-court resolution.
Shari Redstone, the company’s controlling shareholder, has said she favors settling the case. She is set to receive a major payday in a pending sale of Paramount to a Hollywood studio, Skydance, that requires sign-off from the Trump administration. Any settlement would ultimately require the board’s approval, and Ms. Redstone has told the board that she is recusing herself from deliberations related to the lawsuit.
Paramount declined to comment.
Paramount’s interest in settling has dismayed CBS’s news division, in particular the staff of “60 Minutes,” the country’s most popular weekly news program. Four days after the April 18 board meeting, the show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, abruptly announced he would resign, citing encroachment on its journalistic independence and saying Paramount “is done with me.”
Mr. Owens’s resignation sent shock waves through the media industry, which has faced an escalating series of legal and rhetorical attacks from the president. Mr. Trump has sued television networks, threatened to rescind broadcast licenses and barred reporters at disfavored news outlets from attending some White House events.
ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, agreed in December to pay $16 million to settle a defamation case brought by Mr. Trump that many media lawyers considered frivolous. That decision foreshadowed a series of other high-profile settlements with Mr. Trump by corporate law firms and major universities.
Inside “60 Minutes,” Mr. Owens has told confidants that he felt increasing pressure from Paramount in recent months. In January, Ms. Redstone complained to CBS executives about a “60 Minutes” segment about the war between Israel and Hamas. Afterward, a veteran CBS News executive was asked to review coming “60 Minutes” pieces that touched on the Middle East or the Trump administration.
Although no segments were canceled as a result, Mr. Owens was upset by the move. “60 Minutes” has long prided itself on an unusual degree of autonomy from the rest of CBS’s news division, and Mr. Owens told his staff that the additional layer of review could create “a really slippery slope.”
Tensions spiked again on April 13, when “60 Minutes” aired pieces on Mr. Trump’s efforts to annex Greenland and his Oval Office dust-up with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. The president reacted angrily, posting on social media that “60 Minutes,” CBS and Paramount should be punished “for their unlawful and illegal behavior.”
Ms. Redstone was unsettled by that post, and she requested a briefing from George Cheeks, Paramount’s co-chief executive, about politically sensitive segments that “60 Minutes” had planned for the remainder of its season, which ends in May, according to two people with knowledge of the interaction.
Ms. Redstone expressed concern over some of those segments, and encouraged Mr. Cheeks to ensure that the news division was fair to subjects of coverage, although “60 Minutes” made no changes as a result of her remarks, the people said. Bloomberg and Semafor earlier reported on Ms. Redstone’s conversations with Paramount’s leadership.
By then, Mr. Owens had concluded that it would be untenable for him to remain at “60 Minutes” in the long term. Ms. Redstone’s inquiry about future segments prompted Mr. Owens to consider announcing his resignation sooner rather than later, in part to attract public attention and persuade Paramount executives to refrain from meddling with “60 Minutes,” the people said.
He did so in an emotional meeting last Tuesday, during which the correspondent Lesley Stahl choked up and Mr. Owens could barely get out his words. “It’s clear that I’ve become the problem — I’m the corporation’s problem,” he said, according to an audio recording. Mr. Owens lamented “having a minder” and seemed to allude to Ms. Redstone’s request. “In a million years,” he said, “the corporation didn’t know what was coming up.”
The frustration at “60 Minutes” about its corporate owners came to the surface at the end of its Sunday night telecast. In an astonishing segment, the correspondent Scott Pelley, a former anchor of “CBS Evening News” and a longtime friend of Mr. Owens, told viewers that his boss had resigned because he “felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.” Mr. Pelley called out Paramount by name.
Inside the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the worries about interference have not gone away.
This week, some “60 Minutes” producers expressed concern that corporate overseers could potentially interfere with an upcoming segment about conflicts between major law firms and the Trump administration, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.
That segment, hosted by Mr. Pelley, could air as soon as Sunday.
