‘A Sellout to Extortion’: Dan Rather Buries Paramount for Settling Trump-60 Minutes Lawsuit

One of CBS’s most well-known news figures of all-time is condemning the settlement by the network’s parent company, Paramount, of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview.

In an interview with Variety, Dan Rather — who anchored the CBS Evening News for a quarter-century until 2006 — teed off on the settlement in an interview with Variety late Wednesday.

“It’s a sad day for journalism,” Rather told Variety. “It’s a sad day for ’60 Minutes’ and CBS News. I hope people will read the details of this and understand what it was. It was distortion by the President and a kneeling down and saying, ‘yes, sir,’ by billionaire corporate owners.”

Paramount agreed to a settlement in which it will pay Trump $16 million to drop his claims against the company over the edited interview — in which two different versions of the vice president’s answer to the same question appeared in two different CBS broadcasts. Trump alleged the interview was “news distortion” which favored Democrats — a claim may experts considered baseless. Paramount chief Shari Redstone and other executives viewed the lawsuit as a potential roadblock to a sale of the company to Skydance Media and decided to move forward with the settlement as a result.

Rather, in his comments to Variety, expressed concern that the settlement will only move Trump to ramp up the pressure on journalistic organizations going forward.

“Trump knew if he put the pressure on and threatened and just held that they would fold, because there’s too much money on the table,” Rather said. “Trump is now forcing a whole news organization to pay millions of dollars for doing something protected by the Constitution — which is, of course, free and independent reporting. Now, you take today’s sell-out. And that’s what it was: It was a sell-out to extortion by the President. Who can now say where all this ends?”

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