‘We Needed More Balance’: Paramount Chief Shari Redstone Thought Trump’s Lawsuit Against CBS Might Be ‘Helpful’

(Evan Agostini/Invision/Alex Brandon/AP photos)

Shari Redstone, the former controlling shareholder of Paramount Global who has been much maligned for her role in settling a lawsuit filed against her company by Donald Trump, thought that Trump’s lawsuit against and criticism of CBS News might ultimately redound to the network’s benefit.

Trump’s lawsuit stemmed back to a a 60 Minutes interview with his 2024 general election opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, that he argued has been edited to be generous to Harris and hurt his own presidential campaign. The $20 billion lawsuit also hung over Redstone’s hopes of selling Paramount to Skydance, which would need to be approved by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission.

Redstone has been accused of greedily bending the knee to Trump by agreeing to pay $16 million to cover his legal expenses and help build his future presidential library, in addition to other conditions of the deal they struck. But Redstone told The New York Times she was “blown away” by how little Paramount had to give up.

She also, evidently, saw some merit to Trump’s lawsuit and criticisms of CBS more generally.

While legal experts largely dismissed the merits of Trump’s case, Redstone submitted that the “case was never as black-and-white as people assumed.” Redstone was concerned that the discovery process would turn up more evidence of bias at CBS, and in particular, she worried about a 2023 interview with then-President Joe Biden that may have been edited so as to conceal his decline.

Here’s more from the Times‘ account of Redstone’s evaluation of Trump’s lawsuit:

Ms. Redstone said she found most of Mr. Trump’s claims about CBS News to be hyperbolic. But she also had her own concerns about how the news division handled criticism of Israel.

A week before her board presentation, she had complained to Mr. [George] Cheeks, who oversaw all of CBS, about a “60 Minutes” segment featuring former State Department officials who quit their jobs to protest American support for Israel’s war in Gaza. The segment touched on the Hamas attack on Israel but focused on alleged Israeli atrocities enabled by weapons supplied by the United States. Ms. Redstone wasn’t alone in her dismay: The American Jewish Committee said the segment was “shockingly one-sided, lacked factual accuracy, and relied heavily on misguided information.”

Maybe, she thought, Mr. Trump’s criticism of the news division, and his lawsuit, could be helpful.

“We needed more balance,” Ms. Redstone said in an interview, referring to that segment and others over the years. “Part of me thought, maybe Trump could accomplish what I never got done.”

— —