Donald Trump, Paramount Global and the ’60 Minutes’ travesty

In the first six months of this rampage we call the second Trump administration, I’ve mostly managed to come up with columns that had something hopeful, or at least darkly cheerful.

God knows Donald Trump has a taste for the absurd. Though, as far as I can find, he’s incapable of making a self-deprecating joke, his pepper spray of coarse insults (he punches in only one direction: down) and his carousel of wacky branding ideas is in perpetual motion. We ought to expect it for the next three years. But there’s no question he can produce more OMGs and can-you-f’ing believe this? than any living human.

Just last week, in the space of a few short days, he flew in Air Force One to the Everglades to inspect the mosquito-plagued tent camps at Alligator Alcatraz. Is there a more repellent snapshot than Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Department of Homeland Security chief (and dog dispatcher) Kristi Noem, standing together, laughing and joking in front of concentration-camp-like bunks?

In the same few days, Trump signed his Big, Beautiful Billionaire Tax Break & Great Medicaid Slash; shut down what was left of U.S. AID, which may cause 14 million deaths worldwide; signed off on hiring twice as many ICE agents as the FBI’s total workforce, only with masks. And put in a call to his pal Vladimir Putin about stopping the war with Ukraine. Putin’s chummy reply: more savage bombardment of Kiev. Finally, cherry on top of a busy week, Trump announced a new Trump cologne at $249.

You can’t make this stuff up, but I keep trying. Last column, I suggested Trump’s planned presidential library be built in Tampa as a theme park with rides and real Trumparilla pirates looting donors’ money. So it’s easy to imagine a new Everglades ride, with tourists on airboats stopping to gawk at the prisoners — sorry, detainees — through coin-operated telescopes.

Black wackiness aside, there was a darkness we in the journalistic profession were feeling. Another of our institutions, a beloved one, was caving to Trump’s legal wrecking ball, and a pall settled over us. It may yet avoid being called a tragedy, but, in my book, it meets the definition of travesty.

***

Paramount Global, which owns CBS, announced it was ponying up $16 million to pay Trump for a so-called “deceptively” edited “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris before the 2024 election. The “settlement” will — speak of the devil — “go to his library.”

Also in the settlement: “60 Minutes” will release all unedited transcripts of future interviews and run $14 million worth of public service announcements on topics to be chosen by Trump. So the capitulation is total: editorial and advertising. No apology required, none needed for a surrender this unconditional. On the other hand, to its great credit, the show never held back, not even recently, on reporting Trump’s cruelties and erratic policies. Its devastated correspondents choked, but soldiered on.

It’s the management ranks that are bowing, consistent with other cave-ins to Trump’s unquenchable grasp. Law firms and universities have been buckling like old shoes. Before CBS and “60 Minutes” came ABC News (that’s Disney!), which paid Trump $20 million after George Stephanopoulos incautiously used a stronger word to describe what Trump was convicted of by a jury — “sexual abuse” — against E. Jean Carroll.

The White House also banned The Associated Press , publisher of journalism’s most respected style usage guide, for incorrect word usage — that is, not using Trump’s newly-made-up name for the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, over at the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth purged legacy media reporters from their longtime Pentagon slots, replacing many with right-wing boot lickers. NPR and Public Broadcasting, including Big Bird, are scrambling to stay alive under Trump’s relentless defunding.

But “60 Minutes” is something else.

To many of us who worked in news and publishing, whether dailies, weeklies, monthlies or broadcast, one title has stood above the rest for 57 years: “60 Minutes.” There’s never been anything like it in broadcast journalism — deeply respected for its integrity and accuracy, festooned with awards, celebrated for tough questioning, and a consistent killer in the ratings, ranking in the Top 10 of all TV shows. “Tell me a story,” the show’s creator, Don Hewitt, famously said. The stories nearly always delivered, including lighter personal-interest segments, with remarkably few serious errors in over 50 years.

For most of my adult life, the tick-ticking of the CBS stopwatch on Sunday nights had the same effect on me as a bell on Pavlov’s dogs. Tick-tick … ding! A nutritious news treat is coming our way. I learned as much about the world and its malefactors — where have you gone Mike Wallace? — from this single show as any popular TV source in my lifetime.

As to the sordid financial wrangling behind the scenes of the surrender, let me edit it for you, at risk of being prosecuted for the novel crime of deceptive compression. You do not want to read the unedited details.

Briefly, the current owner of CBS, heiress Shari Redstone, needs Federal Communications Commission approval for a merger of her company with another conglomerate run by tech titan Larry Eillison and his son, David. The FCC is being run, no surprise, by another Trump toady.

Larry Ellison founded Oracle and is one of the world’s richest men. Shari Redstone is worth just $500 million, and the merger would add $2 billion more. What’s an heiress to do?

In this story, it is also a fact that Larry Ellison is a Trump supporter. Larry was early MAGA, kind of a first-round tech believer, way earlier than recent Donny-Come-Latelys like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and (checking my crossed-out calendar) Elon Musk.

At issue was the charge that CBS, in shortening and shuffling some of Harris’ responses in her interview shortly before the election, was “deceptively” editing the interview to favor Harris, thus “hurting Trump’s electoral prospects.” Trump claimed, on seeing the unedited interview, that Harris’ “word salad” would have convinced “60 Minutes” viewers that she was a nitwit. He asked for damages for “mental anguish” and for “confusion,” his own included.

I’ve read all the before-and-after transcripts, so you don’t have to. It happens that reading and editing interview transcripts was a central part of my career for 17 years. I was the editor of the Playboy interviews, whose depth and accuracy were widely accepted as state-of-the-art. (“Best interview with me ever done,” said Walter Cronkite.)

I say this not for the pat on the back, but street cred, because I want you to believe me — at least partly on trust. The truth is that showcasing interviews can be messy, sometimes amounting to months of conversations and thousands of pages of raw transcript.

It’s what we do. We edit. To tell a story.

Not to make up a story. Accuracy and intent are always paramount. But right beneath that is always clarity. It’s why the words “edited for length and clarify” accompany interview excerpts. It’s why this column is edited, too.

And here’s the truth that’s hard to handle: No interview I ever published was verbatim. The words were all accurate, had been spoken, but they needed editing – for the reader’s sake. Everyone wanders when they speak. As editors, we would bring together tens of thousands of words into a seemingly unbroken conversation — and we said so. There were always innumerable stops and restarts. Topics would recur that belonged in an earlier section. We were transparent about these multiple sessions and about the fact that they were woven into a story, fit for human digestion.

The craft of editing, and of taking careful liberties for clarity, depends on experience, judgment and good faith. You have to know when to hold the words — every word, exactly as spoken — and when you can fold some of them, for greater clarity.

In editing Playboy interviews, I condensed a great part of Jimmy Carter’s life story, but took exquisite care when he was lecturing us about faith and lust in his doorway in Plains in 1976. Years later, with my interviewer, I shortened John Lennon’s repetitive rants about fights with other musicians in 1980, weeks before his death, but transcribed every syllable of the origins of his songwriting with Paul McCartney.

***

I promised not to drag anyone through the “60 Minutes” transcripts, but here are two before-and-after examples, the only ones I’ll bother with.

Harris: “Well, let’s start with October 7th. Because obviously, what we do now must be in the context of what has happened. And as I reflect on a year ago, and that 1,200 people were massacred, young people at a festival, at a music festival, 250 hostages were taken, including Americans, women were brutally raped, and as I said then, I maintain Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. And as we fast forward into what we have seen in the ensuing weeks and months, far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, and we know that, and I think most agree, this war has to end. And that has to be our number one imperative, and that has been our number one imperative. How can we get this war to end?”

Here’s the shortened version.

Harris: Well, let’s start with October 7th. Twelve hundred people were massacred, 250 hostages were taken… . Women were brutally raped. And as I said then, I maintain Israel has a right to defend itself. Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. This war has to end.”

One is a quarter the length of the other. “60 Minutes” ran the shorter one, obviously. Judge for yourself if the meaning is the same.

Certainly, there are other examples that might show more of Harris’ “word salad,” if that’s the intention. We all commit word salad sometimes, unless you’re a spoken-word freak of nature like Pete Buttegieg. But Trump, I submit to the court, is not the one to complain about word salad or confusion.

Though he’s transgressively glib, and never stuck for an answer, Trump’s digressions are their own kind of word salad. They’re what he calls his “weave” — though more and more disconnected and unhinged in recent months. Read all his transcripts, if you’re a glutton for pain, and you’ll see an unending coleslaw of obsession, invective, revenge, insult and, often, terrific catch phrases. Give the devil his due.

But in the end, let’s be precise about our own words here. The “60 Minutes” settlement was no settlement. It was a bribe. An extortion of the jewel of U.S. broadcast journalism by an unchecked chief executive intent on controlling it all. It is utterly bogus, and I hope I’ve suggested why.

But … I try in my columns not to leave readers in the doldrums, even on this, a topic I can’t find a light slant on.

While I was writing this, I was reflecting not just on Trump’s heist of “60 Minutes,” but about whose hands the show would ultimately be left in. Larry Ellison, a dedicated Trump supporter — and his son David, who will actually be running the company that will own CBS News.

Alas, I thought. The other side owns it all — Congress, the Supreme Court, the federal agencies, in hot pursuit of the universities and the law firms. And now they’ll have our very own journalistic best.

And then I did something restorative.

I fact-checked my assumption.

Here’s what I found.

David Ellison, 42, is a moderate Democrat. And a Trekkie. The company he runs, which will oversee “60 Minutes,” is called Skydance. He contributed heavily to former President Joe Biden. He’s been a producer, tells stories.

Should I be surprised? Three of Rupert Murdoch’s kids are liberals.

Maybe the cavalry coming for some of our legacy media is our next generation.

Maybe, after all, David Ellison will make sure that the “60 Minutes” stopwatch will tick-tick on, scarred but staunch. Not for one side or the other, but editorially unbowed, telling us tough, truthful stories, without fear. Or favor.

Chin up, news fans.

Guest columnist Barry Golson covers the Tampa Bay senior scene. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Forbes and AARP. He is the author of “Gringos in Paradise” (Scribner). Contact him at gbarrygolson@gmail.com.