Paramount agrees to $16M settlement with Trump over edited interview

Paramount Global late on Tuesday said it agreed to pay $16 million to settle President Donald Trump's lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President and former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The media giant will allocate the money to Trump’s legal fees and future presidential library, not directly to the president, Paramount subsidiary CBS News reported.

The settlement didn’t include an apology from Paramount or its subsidiaries. But the company agreed that the 60 Minutes program would release full transcripts of its future interviews with presidential candidates, subject to legal or security redactions, according to CBS.

Why did Trump sue over the interview? The October 2024 interview with Harris was deceptively edited to make her answers look good, Trump’s lawyers alleged, according to the Associated Press. They said the interview caused him mental anguish and misled voters. CBS said it used standard editing procedures and the news outlet released the full interview in compliance with a Federal Communications Commission request. CBS said that two different aired versions of Harris’ answers to a question about Israel, which sparked online debate, each reflected the substance of her longer, unaired answer.

Dig deeper: Read my report on Harvard’s pushback against the Trump administration’s claims that the school enabled anti-Semitism.