Even as lawyers for Paramount Global and President Trump are in discussions about a potential settlement in his lawsuit over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, Paramount and CBS filed a response reaffirming their position that the interview is protected by the First Amendment — and that Trump’s legal team has failed to provide any evidence to the contrary.
“This is a meritless lawsuit that, as Plaintiffs’ opposition admits, takes ‘aim[] at a news organization’ … for editorial decisions Plaintiffs dislike,” Paramount and CBS said in a filing Monday in reply to Trump’s motion to deny CBS’s request to dismiss the lawsuit.
Trump filed the lawsuit against CBS just days before the 2024 presidential election, alleging the “60 Minutes” interview with Harris violated a Texas consumer protection law by misleading voters and caused Trump personal financial harm. In an amended complaint, Trump added Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) as a co-plaintiff and doubled his claims to demand $20 billion in damages.
“President Trump and Representative Jackson attempt to evade bedrock First Amendment principles establishing that public officials like themselves cannot hold news organizations like CBS liable for the exercise of editorial judgment,” CBS said in its June 23 reply.
A key point of Trump’s legal argument is that the edited versions of the “60 Minutes” Harris interview represent commercial speech, and that — as alleged in the president’s lawsuit — CBS competes for advertising with Trump’s media businesses, including Truth Social’s parent company Trump Media & Technology Group (which is majority-owned by the president).
But CBS said Trump has not provided any evidence that the “60 Minutes” interview represents commercial speech.
“Effectively conceding that their claims cannot survive if the Broadcasts are editorial speech subject to full First Amendment protections, Plaintiffs argue that the Broadcasts somehow became ‘commercial speech’ via a simple promotion for the Interview,” CBS said. “But they provide this Court with nothing that would support the conclusion that the Face the Nation and 60 Minutes Broadcasts — involving an interview of a presidential candidate about issues of utmost public concern — are anything but fully protected editorial speech, and they cite not a single case holding that news broadcasts (or promotions for such broadcasts) are commercial speech. Indeed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected that argument. The First Amendment applies fully to the news reporting at issue and bars Plaintiffs’ claims.”
CBS continued in the filing, “Accepting Plaintiffs’ standing arguments would amount to greenlighting thousands of consumer claims brought by individuals who merely disagree with a news organizations’ editorial choices. And President Trump does not even attempt to fill the pleading gaps on his Lanham Act claim by identifying any actionable misrepresentation or how he or any other alleged purchaser materially relied on any purported misrepresentation.”
In a separate filing Monday, CBS reiterated its position that the lawsuit — about an interview filmed in Washington, D.C., and broadcast from New York City — “does not belong in federal court in Texas.”
“Plaintiffs do not dispute that the filming, editing and production work for the challenged Interview took place nearly two thousand miles from this courthouse,” CBS said in the reply. “They do not dispute that the Interview never referenced this state. And they do not dispute that the people most knowledgeable about the Interview all worked in New York or Washington, D.C. President Trump and Representative Jackson do not even allege that they watched the [Face the Nation] or 60 Minutes Broadcasts from Texas when they aired. In short, there is no basis for jurisdiction or venue in this Court.”
In March, Paramount filed a motion to dismiss Trump’s suit, which the company called “an affront to the First Amendment” that is “without basis in law or fact.”
In a filing last Friday, attorneys for both parties said the two sides are “engaged in active settlement discussions, including continued mediation.” Paramount offered $15 million to settle the lawsuit but that was rejected by Trump’s team, which wants at least $25 million as well as an apology from CBS, the Wall Street Journal reported. Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount Global, is said to support the company’s attempts to resolve the “60 Minutes” suit through mediation.
Trump lawsuit’s centers on an exchange in which “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Harris about the Biden administration’s relations with Netanyahu, whom Whitaker said “is not listening” to the White House. CBS News broadcast a longer portion of Harris’s response on Oct. 6 on “Face the Nation,” whereas the edited “60 Minutes” segment broadcast the next day included a shorter excerpt from the same answer. “Each excerpt reflects the substance of the vice president’s answer,” CBS News said in a statement.
In response to an FCC request related to its investigation of a “new distortion” complaint about the Harris interview, CBS News released an unedited transcript of the “60 Minutes” interview with Harris that aired Oct. 6, 2024 (available at this link) and said the materials show that “consistent with 60 Minutes’ repeated assurances to the public,” the broadcast “was not doctored or deceitful.”
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