Good morning. Just a heads up: there will be no Poynter Report on Friday as we celebrate Independence Day. We will return to your inbox on Monday morning. Now to today’s big — and somewhat depressing — media news.

Paramount’s Trump settlement hands CBS News a black eye

There’s no other way to slice it. This is a sad moment in journalism history.

Paramount, the owner of CBS, gave in to President Donald Trump. It buckled. It caved. It made a decision based on business and, as a result, did incalculable damage to the journalistic integrity of CBS News.

CBS and its signature news program “60 Minutes” did a lengthy interview with Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris shortly before the 2024 election. Trump then sued the company, complaining that Harris’ answers were edited in such a way to make her look good and help her win the election.

Paramount and CBS almost assuredly would’ve won such a case. Yet  Paramount settled.

As my longtime colleague Al Tompkins, Poynter senior faculty emeritus and broadcast journalism expert, told me, “It’s odd to call this a ‘settlement’ when the result of it is so unsettling.”

One CBS staffer, speaking anonymously, told CNN’s Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly, “This is a very sad moment for ’60 Minutes,’ CBS News and journalism.”

Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders, called the decision “shameful.”

All of these sentiments are being echoed throughout the journalism community.

No one with a reputable and unbiased legal background believed Trump had a chance in court. Perhaps that cannot be stressed enough in all of this. In the end, CBS called Trump’s suit “meritless.” And legal experts agreed.

Yet, Paramount settled. And why? Paramount is in deep talks to be sold to Skydance in a deal that needs approval from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. This was about business, not journalism. Back in May, amid talks of a settlement, Mother Jones ran a headline that called it, “Trump’s Mob-like shakedown.” That feels accurate.

As far as the particulars, my colleague Angela Fu writes, “In settling, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million towards Trump’s future presidential library and legal fees. The company also agreed to release transcripts of ‘60 Minutes’ interviews with presidential candidates in the future. Paramount did not apologize for its editing.”

And, in case you forgot the exact details, The New York Times’ Benjamin Mullin, Michael M. Grynbaum, Lauren Hirsch and David Enrich reported, “The transcript of the interview showed that Ms. Harris gave a lengthy answer to a question about Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. About 21 seconds of that answer aired in a preview of the interview on ‘Face the Nation,’ another CBS News show. A different seven-second part of the answer aired the next day in a prime-time episode of ‘60 Minutes.”

But do the particulars and details even matter?

While I guess it’s something that the settlement did not include an apology, the damage has been done. Trump can and surely will declare victory from now on, as will his supporters, many of whom are convinced this proves the media is biased against Trump. In fact, a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team called it “another win for the American people” and said that Trump was holding “the fake news media accountable.”

Jeff Fager, a former CBS News chairman who ran “60 Minutes” for 14 years, told Grynbaum and Enrich in an interview Wednesday that the settlement “is a shame, and it’s a mistake.”

Grynbaum and Enrich wrote, “For many veteran correspondents at ‘60 Minutes,’ paying even $1 to settle a left-field lawsuit from an aggrieved president seemed too high a price.”

Fager is also concerned about how the new owners oversee “60 Minutes,” saying, “What matters is how far they are going down the road to curtail what ‘60 Minutes’ covers, and when they air it.”

Writers Guild of America East, the union that represents writers at “60 Minutes” and CBS News, put out a statement that said, “The Writers Guild of America East stands behind the exemplary work of our members at ‘60 Minutes’ and CBS News. We wish their bosses at Paramount Global had the courage to do the same. This settlement is a transparent attempt to curry favors with an administration in the hopes it will allow Paramount Global and Skydance Media merger to be cleared for approval. Paramount’s decision to capitulate to Trump threatens journalists’ ability to do their job reporting on powerful public figures.”

Inside CBS News, the mood was reportedly one of disgust and relief, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Weprin, who wrote, “Disgust, because universally within CBS News and at ‘60 Minutes,’ the lawsuit … was perceived as baseless, and a multimillion-dollar settlement cut by corporate executives is seen as unwarranted. Relief because the months-long melodrama over the suit appears to be over (though there are still some big loose ends that need to be tied).”

CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote in his “Reliable Sources” newsletter, “It's going to take time for CBS News to absorb this gut punch. The newsroom has been distracted and dismayed by Trump's pressure and corporate intrigue for months now. There is widespread outrage and disgust, according to staffers who spoke on condition of anonymity. But this morning, one of the sources said, there is also ‘a slight sense of relief that we can start to put this behind us.’”

Yet there are victims beyond CBS News’ reputation. “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned in protest back in April. News division chief Wendy McMahon was forced to resign because of her pushback.

Meanwhile, Tompkins told me, “There is an old saying that you make your reputation over time but you can lose it overnight. This settlement is not a reflection on the essential and bold work of ‘60 Minutes’ and of CBS. It is a reflection of a vindictive president and corporate heads who did not value one of the fundamental principles that underpin the ownership of a news organization. That principle is stated as the second tenet of the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics: Act independently.”

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Lessons learned

Tompkins did add another thought about the events that led to the Trump lawsuit.

He told me, “There are two lessons, at least, that should emerge from this debacle. The ‘60 Minutes’ interview was badly edited one month before the election. In the version that aired, it appears that Bill Whitaker asked a tightly worded question and Kamala Harris delivered a tough, direct, tightly worded answer about American policy toward Israel. In reality, it was a rambling question and a rambling answer, which would have been ‘bad TV.’ The lesson to journalists: Be transparent about how you do what you do. Viewers expect us to edit interviews, but they expect that in such a high-stakes interview, they should have been able to see what was edited and then, maybe online, see the unedited version.”

He continued, “Since we are focusing on CBS, let’s let Edward R. Murrow teach us the second lesson. He said, ‘No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are his accomplices.’ Murrow added, ‘A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.’”

One more thought (for now)

Here’s what Variety’s Daniel D’Addario said about the Trump-Paramount case:

“We are at a moment of unique peril as the Presidency subsumes every structure and institution within this country; the news media is hardly alone in finding itself unable to fight back effectively. One might hope that the end result of this sorry CBS News episode would be a sort of banding-together, whereby journalists and news organizations renewed their commitment to covering Trump aggressively. While journalists themselves will surely do their very best, the companies they serve seem eager to bend the knee, seemingly convinced that this period we are living through is a temporary moment from which we’ll all recover and not the beginning of a radical shift in how power is wielded in this country. Perhaps all we can do is hope that they’re right.”

G/O Media announces closure after 6 years

For this item, I turn it over to my colleague, Angela Fu.

G/O Media — once the owner of popular websites like The Onion, Jezebel and Deadspin — announced Wednesday that it is shutting down after six years of operation, having sold off most of its portfolio. 

The company said it has sold gaming website Kotaku to Swiss company Keleops, leaving The Root, which covers Black news, as G/O Media’s sole remaining outlet. G/O Media is currently looking for a buyer for The Root as it pursues a “full wind down,” CEO Jim Spanfeller said in a statement posted to the company’s website.

“The ‘why’ here is very straightforward,” Spanfeller wrote. “G/O Media is predominantly owned by a Growth Equity firm named Great Hill Partners. Given how both private equity and growth equity work it became clear to our investors that it was time to move on.”

Great Hill Partners, which purchased Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion and its sister publications in 2019 to form G/O Media, was a “very good partner,” Spanfeller said. But challenges arising from the pandemic, multiple “media recessions” and the dominance of large tech companies in the digital advertising market have prompted G/O Media’s decision to close.

G/O Media has spent the past two years steadily divesting its properties. In 2023, it sold tech website Lifehacker, feminist outlet Jezebel and leftist publication Splinter. The next year, the company sold pop culture site The A.V. Club, food publication The Takeout, satirical site The Onion, technology outlet Gizmodo and automotive news site Jalopnik. (Gizmodo went to Keleops, the same company that later acquired Kotaku.) And then, in April, G/O Media rid itself of business news site Quartz and product reviews site The Inventory.

While some of the companies that acquired G/O Media’s publications attempted to retain former staff, others instituted cuts. The entire staff of Deadspin, for example, was laid off after it was sold to European company Lineup Publishing.

G/O Media’s closure caps six years of contentious relations between Spanfeller and his employees. At one point, roughly 100 unionized journalists across six different outlets went on strike. Several of G/O Media’s publications experienced mass staff resignations. In perhaps the most high-profile incident, the entire Deadspin editorial staff quit in 2019 after Spanfeller told them to “stick to sports.” Many of them went on to start the worker-owned sports and culture site Defector. 

In his Wednesday statement, Spanfeller criticized media unions as often being “counterproductive.” He also revisited the Deadspin incident, arguing that his “stick to sports” directive was a request “for the slightest of changes” before boasting that G/O Media eventually sold the site for more than its purchase price. 

“(T)his has been an era of extreme upheaval and complexity for editorially driven companies driven in part by the increasing market dominance of the walled gardens, the parasitical nature of the AdTech eco-system and the intense cultural wars that the unionization of these companies has brought,” he wrote. 

The future, Spanfeller said, will likely not bring “calmer waters” for the media industry. 

“Hopefully better waters with more respect and financial support for content and the people and companies that create it, but in no way do I see the velocity of change abating at all.”

Media news, tidbits and interesting links for your long weekend review

• CNN’s Lisa Respers France with “The Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs case shows ‘trialtainment’ has evolved in the post-OJ Simpson era.”
• For “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” New Yorker editor David Remnick has an interesting conversation with the Fox New anchor in “Bret Baier on Trump’s Love-Hate Relationship with Fox News.”
• As MSNBC continues to build its reporting roster ahead of the split from NBC News, it made another big announcement on Wednesday. Brandy Zadrozny has been named an MSNBC senior enterprise reporter based in New York. She has been a senior reporter for NBC News — and a really good one — covering the internet with a focus on politics, tech and extremism. Zadrozny told Fast Company, “I’m thrilled to be joining MSNBC after years of reporting alongside its journalists. At a moment when there’s real hunger for fact-based journalism with a clear mission, I’m grateful for the opportunity to keep investigating stories that matter — about disinformation and the fringe forces reshaping our politics — with the support and reach of a network that knows exactly what it stands for.”
• The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough with “CNN’s Fred Pleitgen on Reporting From Iran and What the Media Narrative Doesn’t Capture.”
• Media Matters’ Evlondo Cooper with “National TV news largely failed to connect the record-breaking eastern U.S. heat dome to climate change.”
• For Poynter, PolitiFact’s Jon Greenberg with “When immigration data becomes political theater.”
• The New York Times’ Lindsay Zoladz profiles the legendary rock-and-roller Ringo Starr in “He’s Ringo. And Nobody Else Is.”
• Time’s Belinda Luscombe with “The Making of an American Pope.”
• The Washington Post’s Joshua Partlow and Erin Patrick O'Connor with “What an 8-mile stretch of dirt road says about the meaning of America’s public lands.”
• From the staff of The Athletic: “Hockey insider Bob McKenzie retires after 48 years: A tribute from those he inspired.” A side note to this: For many years, I covered the National Hockey League and first met McKenzie way back in 1992. I will repeat what many said in the tribute. McKenzie treated everyone, no matter how long they had been in the business, with respect and kindness. One of the biggest newsbreakers in hockey, he was already a big deal in 1992 when I was just a 27-year-old “rookie” covering the NHL — and he treated me like a longtime veteran. He’ll go down as one of the most well-known hockey journalists ever. As veteran hockey journalist Pierre LeBrun of The Athletic and TSN so aptly put it, “There was no such thing as an Insider in hockey media until Bob McKenzie invented that role. He is a trailblazer in the way he married a writing career with television before anyone else in hockey ever thought of doing it.”

More resources for journalists

• Learn how to uncover public records and hard-to-find facts in The 5 Ws of Research, an on-demand course taught by veteran journalist Caryn Baird — free for a limited time.
• Journalism leaders of color: Poynter’s prestigious Diversity Leadership Academy has helped over 200 journalists of color advance their careers. Apply today.
• New TV producers: Get the tools to create standout content, handle journalism's challenges, and lead your newsroom effectively. Apply today.
• Join a five-day, in-person workshop that gives new managers the skills they need to help forge successful paths to leadership in journalism, media and technology. Apply today.

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at [email protected].

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