Some interesting information today about why CBS News settled the lawsuit filed against it by President Trump. It was highlighted on X by Alex Thompson, the co-author of Original Sin. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the book about Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection and the subsequent attempt to cover-up his failing mental acuity. I’ve written about the contents of the book multiple times and the bottom line is that there were people around Biden who knew his ability to do the job was declining and who sat on that information and lied to the public.
The media, having spent years ignoring concerns aired by conservatives, have mostly proclaimed ignorance about Biden’s condition, saying the White House worked hard to keep them in the dark. There’s no doubt the White House really was doing their best to hide Biden’s decline, but there were still people who knew. Donors who encountered Biden could tell something was wrong. Elected officials who sat in meetings with him could tell as well. And of course we had the videos, the so-called “cheap fakes” which didn’t require any sources beyond reporters’ own eyes.
Getting back to the new information, this morning Thompson highlighted a portion of a story published by the New York Times which touches on what CBS News knew about Biden’s condition. The story is about Shari Redstone’s decision to sell off her family’s media empire, Paramount Global, for several billion dollars. What does this have to do with Joe Biden’s mental faculties? Well, you may recall that President Trump sued 60 Minutes for its editing of an interview with Kamala Harris prior to the election.
On Monday, Oct. 7, “60 Minutes” ran an interview with the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. On a question about Israel, the show used a different portion of her answer from the one that was seen in an interview excerpt that ran the day before on “Face the Nation.”
Mr. Trump seized on the discrepancy, arguing that “60 Minutes” had “doctored” her “word salad” of an answer to make her look better and hurt his election chances. He demanded that CBS release the full unedited tape of her interview. “We can do it the nice way or the hard way,” he warned on Truth Social.
Even though Mr. Cheeks saw no reason not to, CBS News executives refused to release the unedited footage. It proved a fateful decision. Mr. Trump pursued what he called the “hard way.” On Nov. 1, he sued CBS in federal court in Amarillo, Texas, and demanded $10 billion in damages, a figure he later revised to $20 billion.
This became a big issue because the sale of Paramount Global had to be approved by Trump’s FCC. Shari Redstone wanted to settle to make sure the issue didn’t cloud the sale. But there was pressure from progressives not to settle and not to give any kind of win to the Trump administration. Why settle a case that some lawyers considered weak to start with? It turns out there was something else Redstone and CBS was worried about. If the lawsuit had proceeded, discovery may have led Trump’s lawyers to look into other, similar interviews including one they did with Joe Biden.
The Redstones also worried that Mr. Trump’s lawyers could cherry-pick raw footage and internal communications and do more damage to CBS News’s reputation than any settlement would. Ms. Redstone said CBS personnel had told her that in October 2023, when Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” interviewed President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president had seemed drowsy and had to be prodded to answer. She and Tyler worried that CBS might be accused of editing the interview to conceal Mr. Biden’s failings.
“This case was never as black-and-white as people assumed,” Ms. Redstone said.
In other words, CBS had more to worry about than just the editing of the Harris interview. Settling the case was for the best. But at this point, the NY Times interjects that the Biden interview really wasn’t that bad.
One person who witnessed the interview in person, and another who recently reviewed the raw footage, said the Redstones’ concerns about the Biden interview were overblown. Mr. Biden gave some typically circuitous answers, but he never had to be prodded, they said. On air, Mr. Pelley characterized Mr. Biden as seeming “tired.”
This denial may be the most incredible part of the whole story. We’re just over a year after President Biden had to drop out of his own reelection because his mental decline shocked the world during a presidential debate. And even now the NY Times wants us to take the word of an anonymous Biden insider and an unnamed CBS editor that Biden was fine during that interview. Really? Have you learned nothing from the years of lying about this topic NY Times?
Given that 60 Minutes itself characterized Biden as “tired” it seems unlikely that he was having a good interview. How much worse are the bits 60 Minutes left on the cutting room floor? If you want to quote a source claiming he was fine, force them to go on the record at this point.
We’ll probably never know how bad the interview with Biden was thanks to the board’s decision to settle the Trump case.
Then, on July 2, Ms. Redstone’s lawyer called her with the news she had been hoping for: The board and Mr. Trump had reached a settlement. Paramount would pay $16 million toward Mr. Trump’s eventual presidential library and to cover his legal costs. CBS pledged to release transcripts of future “60 Minutes” interviews with presidential candidates.
It’s a shame it ended there because otherwise we might have learned that CBS knew Biden was struggling long before most of its audience did. That seems like something we really ought to know.
