Why has Paramount paid Donald Trump $16 million over a CBS interview?

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1:40Donald Trump really believes that he is the greatest dealmaker in the world, whether it comes to peace deals or trade deals, whatever he's negotiating, he really does think that he is the best. And there have been a couple of huge negotiations in Washington DC this week that we are going to delve into to see if he really has cut a deal as good as he likes to think. First of all, he's reached a settlement with Paramount, who've agreed to pay his future presidential library$16 million to settle a case over a CBS interview with Kamala Harris during the presidential election campaign. And the negotiations have been ongoing over his big, beautiful bill that has passed its latest turtle and got through the Senate.

2:20It's now gone back to the House of Representatives. But could one of the president's old buddies be about to blow it all up? Welcome to AmeriCast. AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War III. President Trump's message is very simple. We are done being taken advantage of. Mr. President, in the name of our God, have mercy upon the people who are scared. Are you supportive of these onesies? I'm supportive of vaccines. What is happening? Like, this is not America. This is a terrible nightmare. This is what victory feels like.

2:59Yeah!

3:09Hello, it's Sarah, and I'm all on my own in the BBC's Washington Bureau. Hello, it's Mariana, a.k.a. Misinformation, and I'm in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast. And across the way here from Mariana, it is Anthony. I'm still in London. Justin got his term on Monday and now it's Wednesday. Oh, it's my turn. And I get to spend a little time with you. And I feel like now you're here, you do have to call it the worldwide headquarters because it just is, you know. I told Justin, the worldwide headquarters is wherever I am. And so now this is the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast. And how's London been?

3:42It's been lovely. You know, I'm enjoying the hot weather. It's it reminds me of home, reminds me of Texas. And, you know, on Monday, we discussed some ideas of what I could do. And Sarah suggested I should go visit Parliament. And she actually hooked me up. Her sister, Catherine, is a member of the House of Lords, a baroness, I believe. And she gave me and my family a tour of the House of Lords. We were able to sit up on the balcony and look down and see them debating a bill and then go out on this little promenade that stretches out along the Thames and have a drink and have a bite to eat. And it was quite a treat.

4:20So I owe Sarah. She really came through for us. That is such a good – I need to try and think of some good tips of some description. I have lived in London my entire life, so I should be able to do that. Well, almost my entire life. Well, you better get embroiled in a conspiracy at some point, Mariana. I was thinking that. Yeah, the next few days. You know what's really cool? Okay, really fun, random thing to do. In Soho, there are these like noses on the walls. So it was an artist who put them there like several decades ago. And you can go on a walk around Soho looking out for the noses of Soho on the walls.

4:52And it's quite a good way of like walking around London and it's free. The other treat in Parliament is that, Sarah, as you know, I'm sure your sister's friends with Neil Kinnick, the former Labour leader. He came by and said hi and shared some stories. And of course, as an American, the main reason I know Neil Kinnick beyond just the British leader is that he was the man whose speech Joe Biden borrowed from rather extensively and in at least one instance did not give proper attribution to back in 1987 when he was running for president. And that led to Biden dropping out in embarrassment and not running for president again for more than a decade.

5:32And I asked him about that. And he said that one time when he came to visit Biden later on when he was a senator in the early 2000s, Joe Biden in his Senate office invited all of his staff to come around. He put his arm around Neil Kinnick and he told them, this is Neil Kinnick. He is my greatest speechwriter. So he had a sense of humor about it, obviously. One of the big stories this week is Donald Trump versus the US media yet again. I mean, there's many, many branches to this story. But what's happened this week is that CBS and their parent company, Paramount, have settled a long ongoing lawsuit with Donald Trump about an interview with Kamala Harris that was broadcast back in October in the heat of the presidential campaign.

6:14And as part of the settlement, Paramount have agreed to pay$16 million to Donald Trump's future presidential library. The settlement doesn't include an apology or statement of regret, but it's still causing huge waves among the U.S. media that they have agreed to this settlement at all. Anthony, remind us what happened. Right. Obviously, you don't have to apologize. If you're giving someone$16 million, people are going to look at that and think that you're admitting having done something wrong, even if Paramount is trying to insist that they didn't. You have to remember, as you mentioned, back in October, this was the first time Kamala Harris, one of the first times Kamala Harris, gave a really big high-profile interview.

6:55So there was a lot of attention being paid to how she would hold up. The Democratic campaign had been kind of sheltering her earlier, had limited media access to her, and Republicans were turning that into a big issue. What was she hiding? Can she not talk in public? Is she not have a firm grasp of the issues? Pointing back to her 2019 presidential campaign where she did do interviews and she bumbled some of them. And then earlier in the Biden presidency where she had an interview, I believe, with NBC News about the border in Central America and just kind of bungled it. So there was a lot of pressure, a lot of attention to what she was saying in these answers and how how well she would come across.

7:36We started to get little snippets of this interview ahead of time, as often happens in the media. And CBS and 60 Minutes played one little snippet of an answer she gave on Face the Nation, which is a CBS morning show on Sunday. She was asked about her relationship with Israel and the Biden administration's relationship with Netanyahu in particular. And here is what that snippet sounded like. But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening. Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.

8:28So that was Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes giving the question to Kamala Harris. That was her answer, which was a little contorted. But the way it aired the following day in that actual 60 Minutes episode was a little different. Let's hear the way it was edited for her to answer in that interview. But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening. We're not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end. So what Donald Trump in this lawsuit was alleging was that the edited version that aired during 60 Minutes, which was the high profile interview where everyone was paying attention rather than the snippet on Face the Nation the day before, that that was a malicious, deceptive and substantial news distortion intended to confuse, deceive and mislead the public.

9:19So alleging that 60 Minutes gave that shorter answer to make Kamala Harris look better and therefore convince people to support her in the presidential vote later that month or the next month. As someone who not only is a journalist, like all of us, and we think about these things like what clips do you use for a trail? What clips do you keep in the cut and the version that you end up broadcasting, etc., which we'll talk about in a sec. But just in my job as well, this was one of those clips that looking at the undercover voters, it really, really cut through, particularly on X, where lots of people were pointing this out.

9:52And you've now got this thing where, you know, when there's an interview, certainly an interview ahead of an election with a very important politician, everybody, not just the campaigns and other politicians, but actually just like the average voter can pour over these clips and start sharing them. And everyone becomes a detective online. And so what happened with this clip was people very quickly started to point out, well, hang on a second. The answer to this same question in the trail clip was different to the one that was then broadcast as part of the longer interview. And from a kind of non-conspiratorial viewpoint, as someone who like, for example, I do BBC Panorama quite a lot or these longer podcast series.

10:30When we're trailing stuff, like when I'm talking about it on other programs, we obviously choose shorter clips often. I think the issue here comes from the fact that it felt like the answers were different. And that's where the problem arose. But it is really common to, you know, trim a clip down or to not play a full answer when you're trailing something, for example. And that second version was shorter, punchier and said a little bit more. And undoubtedly, she sounded better in that short one. The first one was very waffly. She wasn't saying anything at all. And in the second one, she at least said that the US was clear about its policy that the war should end.

11:03It's normal to edit down a lengthy clip, especially if somebody is waffling like that. and not necessarily with the intention of making the interviewee look better, just in terms of making the interview understandable, coherent and just better to listen to. You know, if you had somebody sort of waffling around the way she was in that first 20 second clip all the way through a lengthy interview, it's just very difficult and boring to listen to. Some people would turn off the television. So it's perfectly normal to do that kind of editing. It's a little bit odd to use a different waffly clip to trail an interview than it is for the one that's in the substantial interview cut down.

11:41Normally, you would just pick a bit of what your edited version and use that as a trail. And of course, if CBS had done that, then, you know, Donald Trump would never know that there was a longer version of that answer. The explanation of it, I guess, is slightly besides the point. Ultimately, before an election, when you're interviewing a really high profile person, the candidate, there is going to be that level of scrutiny. And you can see how obviously it ended up posing a problem. And also we have to appreciate the larger context in this, which is that CBS's parent company, Paramount, has been involved in high stakes merger talks.

12:14And that merger has to be approved by the Trump administration. So one of the reasons why people speculate that Paramount ended up cutting this check and$16 million seems like a lot of money to us, but not necessarily a lot of money when you're talking about billion dollar mergers. They did this to essentially wash their hands and make this problem go away. And people inside CBS, in the news division anyway, are absolutely furious about this because they think it's undermining their journalistic integrity, that this wasn't a mistake in any way needed a settlement or a payment like this. They've lost a couple of members of very senior staff recently, including the editor of 60 Minutes, who said he was worried that he couldn't operate with the kind of journalistic independence that he needed.

12:59And I can tell you from talking to friends of mine as well who work inside there, even people who are still at CBS are really, really concerned about what this means for their journalism going forward. Because we're at a point in time where the Trump administration is being more critical of and coming down harder on journalists and media than just about any administration we can remember. And when you see a company like CBS capitulating like this to him, people are really concerned about what this means of coverage of Donald Trump's administration. One thing that CBS did agree to also as part of this settlement was that they're going to, for presidential candidates, any interviews they do, they will publish the full transcript so you can see exactly what every word that the candidate said was.

13:42And I don't think that's a bad practice. I think that actually helps add transparency so you can see what the editorial process was. You can pull back the curtain a little bit. But to have to do that under the gun of a lawsuit with the pressure that was being put on by the Trump administration, even that gets cast in a kind of a different like looking like a concession rather than a bit of transparency. And it comes in the heels, of course, of ABC having agreed a settlement with Donald Trump as well over something George Stephanopoulos said about his case against the writer E.G. Carroll in New York, that civil case where he was found responsible for a sexual assault.

14:21And that was a case where a lot of people thought it could have been defended in court and the ABC gave in too easily in reaching that settlement with Donald Trump. And so it feels as though there is a pattern of large media organizations giving in a bit too easily from pressure from the Trump administration when there are many people in the country think they're the very ones who should be standing up to him and refusing to give in like this. Yeah. And actually, there was on the flip side, the Des Moines Register, which, as we've discussed in the past, had been sued based on that poll that Ann Seltzer, the highly respected pollster for for Iowa, had done showing Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump in the run up to November's election, a poll that was clearly way off base.

15:04that has been dropped. And I did not see any kind of public agreement or announcement or any kind of concessions that the Des Moines Register made during that. So in some cases, these lawsuits don't amount to anything, don't turn into anything. But in other cases, particularly when there's corporate pressure because of government regulation concerns, and so many big media outlets are owned by corporations now that don't just have news arms, but they have entertainment arms and they have distribution arms and all of these different fingers in different pots, the pressure to not attract the ire of the president of the United States is great.

15:46I mean, the same thing we saw with Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post, where they didn't endorse in the run-up for the first time in that paper's history, endorse a presidential candidate in the run-up to last year's election. When you have corporations involved, there are other factors that come into play. Well, luckily, there are no big corporate backers of AmeriCast. There are no deep pockets here. So if anyone in the Trump administration doesn't like the things that we're saying about him, there is disagree, Soros, Bill Gates, you name it. Yeah, no millions available here if you want to take action with us.

16:18I mean, that was$16 million win for Donald Trump in many ways. In the same week that he scored another victory, essentially, in the Senate, with the one big, beautiful bill being passed through the Senate, after a lengthy stalemate, a very, very long session, 26 hours of debate without a break. And then eventually the Senate voted 50-50 with three Republicans rebelling and J.D. Vance was able to cast the final vote. The yeas are 50. The nays are 50. The Senate being evenly divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative. The bill as amended is passed. So that was the bill that the Senate had taken up, and a little civics lesson again here.

17:00The House had already passed a version, which we had discussed, of this bill. They had their own provisions in it. It then moved on to the Senate, which had to approve the bill in order to send it to Donald Trump's desk. What happened, though, what the Senate did, though, is it changed the bill. It increased some of the cuts to Medicaid, that health insurance program. They ended up adding about about several hundred million dollars, I think it's 700 or 800 million dollars, to the federal debt in addition to the$3 trillion that the House version already had. And now because they made all of these tweaks and changes, it has to go back to the House of Representatives to approve it again, which is where we are at this moment, expecting the House perhaps to vote on the final version of this bill later on Wednesday.

17:47And if they approve it without making any other changes, then it goes to Donald Trump's desk. And Anthony, do we know why it took so long for the Senate to sort of consider this coming to a final decision? It was a remarkable bit of congressional procedural drama. The Senate started two days ago in the morning, nine o 'clock in the morning, with what is called a voter-rama, which is where any senator can bring an amendment to the bill and have an up or down vote on it. And the Democrats, as part of a bit of procedural strategy, just started coming up with amendment after amendment to tack on to this bill to try to get Republicans to take unpleasant votes in order to avoid having the bill be significantly changed and possibly lose votes among Republicans who didn't like the amendment that was being added on to it.

18:37Prior to that, actually, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, the Democrat, made the poor Senate clerks read out all 940 pages of this bill page by page over the course of the weekend until they were done. And that's when the voterama kicked off. So they were all delay tactics, ones that were trying to throw some a little sand in the gears and maybe make things harder on Republicans. But in the end, they got to the point where they would have a vote and they convinced one of the Republican holdouts, Senator Lisa Murkowski, who had objections to the amount of the Medicaid health insurance cuts that were affecting her state, Alaska, the rural residents of her state.

19:20They gave her some sweeteners. They gave her some extra stuff in the bill. She flipped from no to yes. And that's where we got to only three Republicans voting against it when four would have been what was needed to sink the bill. And on that note, the one man, drumroll, who may be able to apply quite a lot of pressure in that sense, is someone who we're still talking about lots, even though him and Donald Trump don't seem to be liking each other. And that would be Elon. Elon! The Elon klaxon. So there was a kind of brief pause to the feud of the bromance. They kind of had a bit of a blowout, didn't they, Donald Trump and Elon Musk?

19:58And then they kind of like settled down a bit and you thought, oh, maybe that was all for a bit of show. Who knows? Maybe they'll be friends in the end. But alas, no. So on Monday, Musk posted on X and he said, quote, every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame. And they will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this earth. He does like space, so who knows? He might be in space by that point. But remember as well that this bill and a lot of this stuff around debt and tariffs was actually at the beginning of their falling out.

20:37So in some ways, it's perhaps unsurprising that this has reignited the feud. And then Donald Trump has come back to what Elon Musk said. And this was his thoughts when he was asked whether he thought that Republicans would side with Musk and Musk's very large amount of money that he has when it comes to this battle. No, I don't think so. I think what's going to happen is Doge is going to look at Musk. And if Doge looks at Musk, we're going to save a fortune. Thank you very much, everybody. I don't think you should be playing that game with me. In another clip, Donald Trump described Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency that Musk created and headed for a while, as a monster.

21:13Well, it's kind of like that, isn't it? It's like Frankenstein's monster. It's like, oh, I've created this thing and now it's going to get you. We might have to put Doge on Elon. You know Doge? Doge is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon. Wouldn't that be terrible? He gets a lot of subsidies, Peter. But Elon's very upset that the EV mandate is going to be terminated. And you know what? When you look at it, who wants? Not everybody wants an electric car. His repost is to say he's going to start a new political party. He says that if this big, beautiful bill passes, he is going to start the America Party so that voters have got a choice that's not just Republican or Democrat.

21:56Now, obviously, he can fund that. But, Anthony, I mean, he wouldn't be the first billionaire to have thought that he could upend the two-party system in American politics just to find it falling flat, would he? Well, you know, we got one in the White House right now. But you could also go back to H. Ross Perot, who ran on massive, cutting massive budget deficits and reducing the federal debt in 1992. And there have been people like Michael Bloomberg who ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 who thinks they can come in and use their business know-how to reform the existing party. So it's not a new thing.

22:37But Elon Musk, whenever he opens his mouth, the price of Tesla drops. And so I think it's pretty clear that Trump does have power over Musk's financial world. And the stockholders of Tesla certainly think that he could be punished if he keeps picking this fight with Donald Trump. And Musk did all of this speaking out before the Senate voted and nothing changed. Yeah, and I think that that's kind of what this comes down to, particularly when we're thinking about this kind of concept of this new America party that Elon Musk has mentioned. And what it could mean is that ultimately, does Elon Musk alone have that much power, really?

23:14because it seems like a lot of the power that he managed to sort of wield around the election, like he obviously afforded Donald Trump some huge benefits and was very keen on promoting his stuff on X, for example. And it's actually really interesting. I was looking at some research done by the Reuters Institute for Journalism. And they do this report every year about the kind of state of the media. And one of the things that they tracked was the difference in political leanings of users on X. So since Elon Musk bought it, the proportion of right-leaning users is much greater than, well, certainly a bit greater than left-leaning users.

23:52And that's been really interesting in terms of its impact on political discussions. But ultimately, again, it's kind of like Elon Musk's, for example, threats to politicians. Like how much weight do they hold when they're not going to necessarily be amplified or further amplified by Donald Trump supporters and Donald Trump himself? So then you think, well, OK, if Elon Musk tries to do something else, who could he team up with? who would be his new Batman and Robin, like if he's Robin, he probably wouldn't like that, and Trump is Batman, then who is going to be his new sort of like main superhero or villain, whatever you prefer to call them.

24:24A remarkable situation though, isn't it, where the President of the United States facing down the richest man in the world appears fairly easily to be the victor of that. And good news for Donald Trump in a week where he got his bill, passed through the Senate, he settled that case with CBS, You know, things are things are moving in the right direction for him, except for one thing in that big voterama. Did you notice this, Anthony? There was one amendment that he will not have liked at all, which said it's not allowed to be called the Big Beautiful Bill. I know. Yeah. They stripped the one thing from it that that he his branding.

25:04So I think he's going to be a little disappointed. Of course, he'll still call it that. So it doesn't say it on the headline of the legislation, but what Republican is going to say, well, actually. Right. I think that's the end of our big, beautiful bill or not chatter. But to finish off how we started with the excitement of Anthony being in the UK and in London, we have had so many great suggestions of British things that Anthony can do while he's here on his trip. Here's one that has come from Rebecca, who works at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And she says, Dear AmeriCast, may I suggest that Anthony should experience punting with Pimms?