Sometimes the smallest details tell the biggest parts of a story.
One of the key reasons the parent company of CBS agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump is buried dozens of paragraphs into a New York Times report about now-former Paramount non-executive chairwoman Shari Redstone and the company’s decision-making process.
And it turns out, it involves an apparent play to protect now-former President Joe Biden.
Trump had sued CBS in October over its editing of an interview on the “60 Minutes” program with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. He maintained that “60 Minutes” edited Harris’ answers to make her appear more coherent than she actually was.
Paramount settled the suit in early July with a $16 million donation to the Trump presidential library fund.
According to The New York Times, Redstone and her son, Tyler, feared the lawsuit would bring attention to another CBS interview — this one with President Joe Biden.
“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,” Redstone told the newspaper.
What’s interesting here is that in the “60 Minutes” report itself, correspondent Scott Pelley — a man who openly declared his liberal leanings at a May commencement speech at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University — acknowledged that Biden was “tired,” though he tried to put the best face on it.
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From the show’s transcript: “As we spoke to the president, his secretary of state was in Israel, his secretary of defense was in a NATO meeting on Ukraine. America’s oldest president seemed tired from directing all of this. But he was very clear on what he stood for and how his policies, in his view, would see America through.”
If Pelley and “60 Minutes” felt the need to put in posterior-covering garbage like that, it’s truly hard to imagine how bad the actual footage the program left out really was.
The fact that Redstone was worried about raw footage being cherry-picked (the article’s word) by Trump’s lawyers is a pretty good sign that the then-sitting president of the United States — a man with a nuclear arsenal at his command — came across like he was drooling his way through an after-lunch nap.
Media analyst Mark Halperin, one of the sharpest voices of journalism criticism in the country (just ask former Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler), picked up on the story on his “2Way Tonight” show on the 2WayTV media platform. While he was way too forgiving of CBS on the subject of the Kamala Harris interview, he hit the nail right on the head when it came to Biden.
A New York Times interview with Shari Redstone reveals one reason she wanted Paramount to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit over how “60 Minutes” edited its October 2024 interview with Kamala Harris: the discovery process could expose the program’s editing of a 2023 Joe Biden… pic.twitter.com/7ySrXMEnUX
— 2WAY (@2waytvapp) August 21, 2025
“Halperin’s fifth rule of the media, or Washington, rather, is anything that’s famous for not being released will eventually have to be released,” Halperin said. “We all now want to see the outtakes of this Biden interview.”
The mention of the Biden interview is treated as a minor part of the overall report, which was written by New York Times business reporter James B. Stewart. But it’s clear that it played a major role in Redstone’s decision when it came to the Trump lawsuit.
Redstone’s comment in the report that the case was “never as black and white as people assumed” can fairly be read as an admission there were grounds for normal Americans to conclude that “60 Minutes” was indeed engaging in exactly the kind of “ongoing false, misleading, and deceptive acts” that Trump’s lawsuit claimed.
In the case of the Kamala Harris interview, CBS actually publicized two answers Harris gave to one question — one was in promotional material for the show, and the other was on the “60 Minutes” program proper. The one that made her sound better was used in the setting where she had the greatest visibility.
In the Biden interview, one of the most liberal broadcast journalists in America felt obligated to at least mention the then-president’s physical weariness, because it obviously couldn’t be hidden.
But what could be hidden was footage of just how bad Biden was, and to keep that footage under wraps, Redstone agreed to a settlement that was essentially a humiliation for “60 Minutes” and CBS News as a whole.
It’s a detail that was buried in the report from The New York Times — 46 paragraphs into an 86-paragraph article.
But sometimes it’s a small detail that tells a larger story.
In this case, it’s the larger story of the decline of the once-vaunted “60 Minutes” — and the propaganda press it’s a part of.
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