Call it Mission: Not Totally Impossible. Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of the $8 billion media large Paramount Global, started talks to promote her stake in December 2023. A 12 months and change later, employees, shareholders, and even viewers are on the sting of their seats, questioning what’s going to occur subsequent.
Paramount’s legal professionals are within the midst of settlement talks with President Donald Trump over his complaints concerning the modifying of a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. CBS stated it unnoticed a clumsy reply to a query about US-Israel relations due to time constraints, although it had used the reply in a promotion for the upcoming interview. Trump believes CBS’s high information present portrayed Harris in a optimistic mild, interfering with the election, and sued below the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, a legislation normally employed to protest false promoting claims. Trump had declined the present’s invitation to talk forward of the election. He expanded his case in February, claiming $20 billion, up from an preliminary $10 billion, for having been harmed as a competitor to CBS through his social media community, Truth Social. The community, in the meantime, believes its edited interview has First Amendment protections.
Redstone has reportedly stated that she is taking herself out of the talks, leaving it to her three chief executives to determine the mess. That has left some feeling pissed off. “She needs to resolve this. Shari has the most to lose,” stated one individual acquainted with the place of Redstone, who must pay a $400 million breakup price if the deal have been to not occur. (A CBS News spokesperson declined to remark. The White House press workplace didn’t reply for remark.)
If issues go in Trump’s favor, Paramount Global will change into the most recent media group to pay Trump thousands and thousands, sending yet another chill down journalism’s backbone. On April 30, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount is able to settle the dispute for between $15 million and $20 million. But if the president doesn’t just like the quantity, a deal might not occur in any respect.
Adding to the strain, a group of 9 senators wrote a letter, made public on May 7, to the Paramount Global controlling shareholder, imploring her to not settle the case with Trump: “In our view, that would be a grave mistake.”
“Rewarding Trump with tens of millions of dollars for filing this bogus lawsuit will not cause him to back down on his war against the media and a free press,” the lawmakers wrote. “It will only embolden him to shakedown, extort, and silence CBS and other media outlets that have the courage to report about issues that Trump may not like.”
Trump shared a livid assertion on Truth Social on Wednesday, May 7, concerning the Emmy nomination that the 60 Minutes interview with Harris obtained within the modifying class. “These antics are why the American People have no trust in the Press, and demand that the Media, very much including 60 Minutes, CBS and its owners, be held responsible for their corruption and lies, which is exactly what we are doing in Court!”
Meanwhile, Redstone had been in on-again-off-again merger talks with David Ellison, the proprietor of Skydance Media. At one level Redstone even walked away from these negotiations earlier than returning to finalize a sophisticated deal that may contain her shedding her voting management in Paramount by promoting her stake in National Amusements, Inc. The present settlement with Skydance is backed by each Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and Gerry Cardinale’s private-equity agency, RedBird Capital (the place former CNN chief Jeff Zucker has a joint-venture enterprise).
If Brendan Carr’s Federal Communications Commission provides the deal the go-ahead, Redstone will get to money a examine price greater than $1.75 billion and exit the enterprise her grandfather Mickey Redstone helped set up. Redstone inherited her father Sumner’s controlling stake in what was then referred to as ViacomCBS in 2020, after his loss of life at age 97.
