AP Photos / Illustration by Katie KosmaThe Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate
As Paramount prepares for a merger, the Freedom of the Press Foundation stands to challenge the company for capitulating to Trump. Will it work?
July 25, 2025, By Kyle Paoletta
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Early this month, as soon as the news broke of Paramount’s decision to pay President Donald Trump’s foundation sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit against CBS News, the Freedom of the Press Foundation moved to take legal action. The FPF, as it’s known, tracks and resists government infringement on the news media. It’s also a Paramount shareholder, prepared to push for those interests with corporate muscle. Trump’s case, and the response of Paramount’s board, immediately set off alarm bells, as the company was in the midst of pursuing an eight-billion-dollar merger with Skydance, a Hollywood studio, that required approval from the Federal Communications Commission. “They’re essentially making a handshake deal with Donald Trump,” Seth Stern, the FPF’s advocacy director, told me. He and the FPF’s legal team believed that such a deal could be a violation of federal bribery laws. And, he noted, Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, stands to make two billion dollars from the merger. “I would think that, regardless of what Shari has to offer the rest of the board,” Stern said, “the prospect of potential prosecution for bribery would be something they would think quite hard about.”
Now it’s clear that Paramount’s board has decided the risk of prosecution is well worth a multibillion-dollar payday. On Thursday, the FCC signed off on the Skydance merger, clearing a path for its completion. “Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change,” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, announced, praising the deal for its commitment to “unbiased journalism” and assurances that “discriminatory DEI policies” will end. But when I spoke to Brenna Frey, a lawyer for the FPF, in the wake of the settlement announcement, she was incensed. “This is an affront to the shareholders of Paramount, but it’s also an affront to CBS’s reporters and to the First Amendment,” she said.
In Stern’s view, Paramount’s willingness to settle had been a calculated surrender. The premise of Trump’s lawsuit—that 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with Kamala Harris last fall represented “fraudulent interference with an election”—was unlikely to hold up to legal scrutiny. “The lawsuit was laughable,” David Snyder, the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said. “What they were trying to attack here was CBS News’s choices about how they edited footage from an interview. That sort of editorial judgment is at the core of First Amendment protections, generally, but especially if it’s about public figures right in the middle of an election.”
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Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate – Columbia Journalism Review
