The television news magazine 60 Minutes — the most storied and profitable show in the history of CBS News — currently finds itself as the avatar of President Trump's onslaught against the media in the courts and the court of public opinion.
Despite brave talk from the news division, CBS's parent company appears to be inching toward capitulation, as its controlling owner wants to drag CBS out of the headlines and wrap up a corporate sale.
Before becoming president, Trump sued CBS over 60 Minutes' interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris shortly before the election. Now, Trump's newly elevated Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, is using the levers of government to put pressure on the network.
On Monday, at Carr's request, CBS News sent the raw footage and the full transcripts of the interview to the FCC. On Wednesday, the FCC posted it publicly. Carr announced the agency would proceed with a formal investigation, tweeting "The people will have a chance to weigh in."
CBSpublished the videos and transcripts shortly after, along with a statement defending its journalism. It did not comment in response to NPR's questions for this story.
Before Carr's involvement, CBS had refused to release those materials, calling Trump's demand for them an intrusion on its journalists' First Amendment rights. Democratic Commissioner Anna M. Gomez called the FCC's investigation part of "the administration's focus on partisan culture wars" and urged her fellow commissioners to dismiss it.
"Now, more than ever, only a fearless press stands between an aggressive [White House] and the public," former CBS News correspondent Marvin Kalb posted on a Facebook page for CBS alumni. "If news organizations such as CBS bend a knee before a president, then we have all taken a big step towards autocracy."
The clash at CBS represents just the latest front in a multi-pronged assault on the press waged by the second Trump administration, using litigation, regulatory agencies, budget powers, executive prerogatives and sympathetic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
The specifics hinge on an editorial choice made by the network. In previewing last fall's interview with Harris on Face The Nation, CBS used a different portion of her answer to a question about Israel than it used in the lengthier broadcast on 60 Minutes. Trump and his conservative allies alleged that the network had edited the answer to mask her incompetence in an act of partisan bias. (Trump pulled out of an interview with the show, a tradition with presidential candidates.)
A CBS corporate statement issued last week said the network was legally required to comply with the request from the FCC chairman, although the network has challenged agency actions in the past. A CBS News spokesperson did not reply to NPR's requests for comment, including to the question of why it could not have publicly posted the transcripts earlier on its own authority.
In its statement Wednesday, CBS said the difference reflected an editorial judgment made for two separate programs. The full transcripts show "the 60 Minutes broadcast was not doctored or deceitful," CBS said in the statement.
"In reporting the news, journalists regularly edit interviews — for time, space or clarity," CBS said. "In making these edits, 60 Minutes is always guided by the truth and what we believe will be most informative to the viewing public — all while working within the constraints of broadcast television."
CBS's parent company looks toward settlement — and a corporate sale
According to several people with knowledge of internal deliberations, the network's corporate parent Paramount appears poised to settle Trump's lawsuit, even though it is widely seen as lacking legal merit. (They asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject and the ongoing litigation.)
Inside the newsroom, 60 Minutes Executive Producer Bill Owens has insisted to the show's staff he won't make an apology, according to several colleagues. (The remarks were first reported by the New York Times.) Similarly, the president and chief executive of the news division, Wendy McMahon, has told associates she opposes any settlement. A review of the raw transcript shows Harris approaching a delicate and complicated issue warily, seeking to avoid any big headlines.
As FCC chairman, Carr has taken an expansive view of his regulatory powers to exert pressure on the media. In the case of CBS, he has significant leverage to do so: Carr and his agency are currently weighing whether to approve Skydance Media's acquisition of Paramount, CBS's parent company. Neither Carr nor the FCC responded to NPR's requests for comment.
The agency's power derives from regulating Paramount's 27 local television stations; the transaction would involve the transfer of the licenses Paramount holds to Skydance to operate them on the public airwaves. The Justice Department or Federal Trade Commission could also intervene. Federal lawyers sought to block AT&T's takeover of CNN's parent company during Trump's first term.
For all of the drama, however, the struggle over CBS cannot be viewed in isolation.
At the FCC, Carr's Democratic predecessor dismissed claims involving all four major networks – CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox – shortly before leaving office. Beyond CBS, Carr has revived formal reviews involving the programming choices of ABC and NBC, though he notably did not reignite the complaint about Rupert Murdoch's Fox station in Philadelphia linked to Fox News' amplification of lies of election fraud in 2020.
A full-court press on the press
More broadly, the president and his allies are seeking to pressure the media writ large, both to inhibit its ability to check the president and to punish it for coverage he views as unfavorable.
ABC News' parent company, The Walt Disney Co., paid $15 million toward Trump's future presidential library, plus another $1 million in legal costs, to settle Trump's defamation suit over inaccurate remarks about him by anchor George Stephanopoulos. The social media giant Meta paid $25 million to settle Trump's suit over sidelining him from Facebook after the January 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol.
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong stopped their newspapers from endorsing Harris ahead of the 2024 election. They each cited the low esteem in which the media is held by the broader public. Both owners are billionaires with major business concerns before federal agencies; in Amazon founder Bezos's case, they include contracts worth billions of dollars.
In Trump's first term, he publicly criticized the possibility of Amazon receiving a multibillion-dollar cloud computing contract it expected to win from the Pentagon; when it went to Microsoft, Amazon sued and was ultimately given a share of it.
Bezos sat on the dais during Trump's inauguration with other tech titans. Soon-Shiong has tweeted energetically in support of Trump and his nominee to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and has patents pending awaiting the review of federal officials.
Beyond CBS, Trump still has lawsuits pending against Gannett's Des Moines Register for polling ahead of the election that inaccurately found Harris in the lead (Trump won Iowa decisively) and the committee that awards Pulitzer Prizes over awards given to coverage of the 2016 Trump campaign's ties to the Russian regime.
"Each settlement weakens the democratic freedoms on which these media organizations depend," Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, writes in the New York Times. "They create precedents — not legal ones, but precedents nonetheless — that will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits. They also damage the media institutions' prestige and credibility."
The challenges arrive in ways large and small.
Under new Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, the Defense Department tossed Politico, NPR, the New York Times and NBC News from their reserved press spaces at the Pentagon in favor of the conservative New York Post, the right-wing Breitbart and One America News Network and the liberal HuffPost, a site that, according to a spokesperson, hadn't asked for a workspace. No press credentials were revoked; the dislodged outlets can still visit the Pentagon and report there.
Carr opened an inquiry into NPR and PBS, saying he was concerned their corporate underwriting spots had become virtually indistinguishable from commercials. The two public broadcasting giants said they were scrupulous to follow the law and guidance from the FCC itself over the decades. Carr used his announcement to urge lawmakers on Capitol Hill to review whether to fund public broadcasting at all.
A question to the White House press secretary
When Trump's chief spokesperson was asked about government spending on news organizations at a news briefing on Wednesday, the question brought a smile to her lips.
"Coming out here, to the briefing room, I was made aware of the funding from the U.S. [Agency for International Development] to the media outlets, including Politico, who I know has a seat in this room," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. "I can confirm that the more than 8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone essentially to subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the public taxpayer's dime will no longer be happening."
Politico's leaders said in a memo that myriad government agencies subscribe to Politico Pro, the fact-drenched paid research service drawn upon by policymakers and specialists in government and the private sector alike.
And it is doing so at a time when government officials are promising to slash the budgets of federal agencies performing independent research, pulling back on how much information is available to the public, and firing a slew of inspectors general, who provide Congress and the public with watchdog reports on what the government is doing out of view.
The question was posed to Leavitt by a new face in the press room: Brian Glenn, a national correspondent for the far-right Real America's Voice network. He is also dating U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and Trump backer.
Last week, Greene invited the chief executives of NPR and PBS to Capitol Hill for hearings on federal funding for the public broadcasters over what she said was their "blatantly ideological and partisan coverage." The two public broadcasting chiefs said in separate statements that their networks offer independent, non-partisan news coverage and educational programming for the nation without cost.
"The opposition party is the media," former Trump White House political strategist Steve Bannon told PBS' Frontline back in 2019, during Trump's first term in office. "And the media can only — because they're dumb and they're lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time."
"And all we have to do is flood the zone," Bannon said. "Every day we hit them with three things, they'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done."
Disclosure: This news analysis was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
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