Selling the First Amendment
How Corporate Media Funded Its Own Muzzle
On July 2, 2025, the New York Times reported: “Paramount said late Tuesday that it has agreed to pay President [Donald] Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program 60 Minutes.” The unprecedented move by a major media corporation to pay off a sitting president sparked outrage. Referring to the widely held belief that the federal government withheld approval of the Paramount-Skydance merger until a settlement was reached, former CBS anchor Dan Rather called it a “sellout to extortion by the president.” Critics saw the lawsuit as part of Trump’s broader campaign to intimidate and silence the press.
But while the backlash focused on Trump’s motives, it missed the deeper threat to press freedom: the for-profit news model. Trump’s strategy only worked because CBS, like many media outlets, is part of a massive corporate conglomerate chasing profit over principle. And CBS isn’t alone—Disney’s ABC and others have faced and caved under similar pressure in Trump’s second presidential term. The settlement, likely to smooth the path for a lucrative merger for CBS’ parent company Paramount—worth far more than $16 million, reveals a media system that prioritizes shareholder value over truth-telling. Trump, ever the con man, didn’t corrupt the system—he simply took advantage of one already built to be corrupted.
The lawsuit stemmed from Trump’s accusation that 60 Minutes selectively edited an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris to make her appear more poised and articulate. When the unedited footage surfaced, it did show Harris coming off as more focused in the broadcast version than she did in the raw interview footage. Still, as many media professionals have pointed out, this type of editing is common—not necessarily to boost a candidate, but to retain viewers.
Television news is shaped by commercial logic: messy, rambling interviews don’t hold attention. A case can be made that CBS was less concerned with favoring Harris than with maintaining a watchable product that wouldn’t drive audiences to change the channel.
Given that such editing is standard practice, the settlement was widely viewed as a blow to press freedom – especially since longtime 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon resigned over the ways in which the lawsuit had threatened CBS’ independence. Critics warned from the start that Trump’s lawsuit was more about censorship than justice. His disdain for the free press is no secret, often dismissing legitimate journalism as “fake news” during his first term in office. During his second term, Trump has repeatedly tried to defund public media like NPR and PBS, and has transformed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)—a regulator meant to serve the public interest—into a political weapon. Under his administration, FCC Chair Brendan Carr launched overtly partisan investigations, from probing Disney over diversity to withholding approval on the CBS-Skydance merger over editorial disagreements. In addition, he has launched frivolous lawsuits—like one against the Des Moines Register over a poorly conducted poll that ironically may have helped his campaign by misleading Harris voters into complacency (the lawsuit was dropped by Trump’s legal team). Relatedly, Trump has openly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from networks critical of him. Including, CBS, for not parroting Trump’s views on issues like Greenland and Ukraine.
Others have viewed the lawsuit as an attempt by Trump to hold the legacy news media accountable for propagandizing the public. For example, when Senator Bernie Sanders, shortly before the settlement was announced, suggested on a June 2025 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience that editing interviews was not a crime and the lawsuit was a politically motivated attempt to chill press freedom, Rogan disagreed. Instead, Rogan kept asking: "Don’t you think there is a real issue with that they did?"
California State University Northridge Professor Elizabeth Blakey explained that while CBS’s edits may appear unethical to some Trump supporters, they do not constitute a crime or legal violation. Trump’s lawsuits are widely viewed as “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (SLAPPs)—legal actions not intended to win in court, but to punish and intimidate critics through the legal process itself. To be clear, media organizations can commit crimes like defamation, but proving defamation requires clear evidence of both intent (knowingly publishing false information) and damages (demonstrable harm to the plaintiff).
Legal or not, many critics of the lawsuit act as if the U.S. press was free and thriving before Trump’s second term. However, since the 1980s, media consolidation and corporate ownership have created a system ripe for manipulation. Today, a small number of corporations control both major news outlets and internet traffic. As media scholar Robert McChesney argued, a healthy democracy requires not just for-profit media but also strong public and independent journalism. While talented public and independent outlets do exist in the U.S., they’ve been largely sidelined by corporate gatekeepers—especially through algorithmic censorship on search engines and social media feeds. Dominant corporate platforms prioritize profit over truth, shaping content to serve advertisers rather than inform the public.
This isn’t new. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, media barons like Jay Gould and William Randolph Hearst bought newspapers to shape public opinion and elections in their favor. By the late 20th century, corporate titans like Jack Welch used General Electirc’s ownership of NBC to promote pro-war content that benefited its defense contracts and pushed business-friendly narratives via CNBC.
The trend continues today: Elon Musk buys Twitter, Trump launches Truth Social, and Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. These aren't journalistic ventures—they're power plays. Musk altered Twitter’s algorithm to favor pro-Trump content; Truth Social functions as a platform for Trump’s political and financial interests; and Bezos has reportedly suppressed stories that threaten his image, from unflattering political cartoons to the Post's endorsement of then–Vice President Kamala Harris.
These examples reflect Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s argument in Manufacturing Consent: the corporate press doesn’t serve the truth—it serves power. When profit dictates content, journalism turns into propaganda, crafted to promote the interests of corporate owners rather than inform the public.
This may help explain why the press has missed or gotten so many pivotal stories wrong in recent decades such as:
the lies about weapons of mass destruction that justified the Iraq War;
the Wall Street corruption leading up to—and after—the 2008 crash;
the unacknowledged public dissatisfaction with Democrats in 2016;
the baseless hysteria of Russiagate;
the decades’ worth of the sex crimes by wealthy and powerful people in media prior the MeToo movement;
the heavily partisan framing of COVID-19 policies;
and the open signs of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline—ignored by reporters closest to him.
Yes, many of these stories were eventually corrected—but only after the damage was done. The book Original Sin by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alexander Thompson is a prime example: it defends the media for failing to report that the person political reporters were supposed to be covering—President Biden—was unable to campaign or possibly fulfill the duties of the office. Getting the story right six months after the election did nothing to help the country consider an alternative candidate during the primaries a year earlier. In fact, correcting or finally reporting a story long after it’s relevant often serves more to protect the corporate media’s reputation than to hold it accountable for missing or mishandling the story in the first place.
It should be clear that even critics of corporate news media do not believe that these collective failures result from top-down directives. As Noam Chomsky pointed out, the filtering often begins at the hiring stage. In response to a journalist who denied being censored by his editor, Chomsky said: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” In other words, the corporate press doesn’t need to silence dissent—it avoids hiring dissenters in the first place.
Meanwhile, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Cay Johnston points out that too many political reporters are encouraged to focus on getting those in power on the record, rather than investigating them. While getting officials on the record is important, he argues, it must be balanced with deeper investigative reporting.
In much of the corporate news media, it’s often those who challenge the corporate establishment—not those who make errors—who face consequences. To be clear, all journalists get things wrong from time to time; that’s why journalism is often called the first draft of history. The goal is to correct mistakes and keep reporting in pursuit of the truth. But when journalists like Mehdi Hasan, Glenn Greenwald, Abby Martin, Krystal Ball, and Marc Lamont Hill are pushed out of mainstream outlets, it’s not because of factual inaccuracies—it’s because their arguments or reporting challenge powerful interests. Meanwhile, corporate-friendly figures who get major stories wrong—Judith Miller (Iraq WMDs), Juan Williams (Islamophobic commentary), Chris Cuomo (family cover-ups), and Rachel Maddow (Russiagate hype)—often land new jobs, raises, or both.
The fall of any media outlet to authoritarian influence is a tragedy. But let’s not pretend Trump created this crisis—he merely exploited a system built decades ago, cheered on by media consolidators, corporate apologists, and the audiences who trusted them. From Paramount’s corporatist perspective, the $16 million payout was a small price to secure a lucrative merger. The loss of journalistic independence is just the cost of doing business.
Trump isn’t a magician; he’s a symptom. And CBS’s settlement isn’t an attack on the First Amendment—it’s the bill coming due for decades of corporate media’s failure to defend it.
Nolan Higdon is a political analyst, author, host of The Disinfo Detox Podcast, lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Project Censored National Judge.
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I wish the president sent here was that no media can edit anything anyone says and all has to be submitted raw.