Politics
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February 3, 2025
Paramount’s settlement negotiations with President Trump are just one example of the administration’s encroaching suppression of free speech.
President Donald Trump speaks to the press on the South Lawn of the White House in 2018.
(AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin)
Current Issue
The news that Paramount, the media leviathan that encompasses both Viacom and CBS News, was negotiating a settlement of Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the newsmagazine show 60 Minutes was, sadly, no news at all. Since Trump’s reelection, ABC News—a profit-challenged division of the Disney Corporation—settled a similarly ginned-up Trump claim against the network for George Stephanopoulos’s on-air comment that the former president had been held “liable for rape” in E. Jean Carroll’s successful civil suit against him. (In reality, Stephanopoulos was summarizing the finding of the presiding judge in the Carroll trial—a far cry from the traditional benchmarks of willful disregard of the truth and actual malice that have long guided judgments favoring plaintiffs in defamation cases.)
The complaint at the heart of Trump’s Paramount suit is leagues more frivolous than…
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