Sometimes the smallest details tell the biggest parts of a story.
One of the key reasons the parent company of CBS agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump is buried dozens of paragraphs into a New York Times report about now-former Paramount non-executive chairwoman Shari Redstone and the company’s decision-making process.
And it turns out, it involves an apparent play to protect now-former President Joe Biden.
Trump had sued CBS in October over its editing of an interview on the “60 Minutes” program with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. He maintained that “60 Minutes” edited Harris’ answers to make her appear more coherent than she actually was.
Paramount settled the suit in early July with a $16 million donation to the Trump presidential library fund.
According to The New York Times, Redstone and her son, Tyler, feared the lawsuit would bring attention to another CBS interview — this one with President Joe Biden.
“Ms. Redstone said CBS personnel had told her that in October 2023, when Scott Pelley of ’60 Minutes’ interviewed President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the president had seemed drowsy and had to be prodded to answer. She and Tyler worried that CBS might be accused of editing the interview to conceal Mr. Biden’s failings.”
“This case was never as black-and-white as people assumed,” Redstone told the newspaper.
What’s interesting here is that in the “60 Minutes” report itself, correspondent Scott Pelley — a man who openly declared his liberal leanings at a May commencement speech at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University — acknowledged that Biden was “tired,” though he tried to put the best face on it.
From the show’s transcript: “As we spoke to the president, his secretary of state was in Israel, his secretary of defense was in a NATO meeting on Ukraine. America’s oldest president seemed tired from directing all of this. But he was very clear on what he stood for and how his policies, in his view, would see America through.”
If Pelley and “60 Minutes” felt the need to put in posterior-covering garbage like that, it’s truly hard to imagine how bad the actual footage the program left out really was.
The fact that Redstone was worried about raw footage being cherry-picked (the article’s word) by Trump’s lawyers is a pretty good sign that the then-sitting president of the United States — a man with a nuclear arsenal at his command — came across like he was drooling his way through an after-lunch nap.
Hellbound and Down 