Earlier this week, CBS News filed a strong brief outlining why President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the editing of its 2024 interview with Kamala Harris is completely frivolous and an affront to the First Amendment.
But just days later, The Wall Street Journal reported that a mediator had proposed CBS owner Paramount Global settle the suit for $20 million. It’s been reported that Paramount — believing the Trump administration will block its merger with Skydance Media if it doesn’t settle – had previously offered $15 million, which Trump declined, demanding at least $25 million.
A mediator’s job is to find a compromise number, so, from that perspective, it’s easy to understand why they’d propose $20 million (mediators get paid the big bucks to do that kind of math). But mediators are still under an obligation not to facilitate criminality. And, as both federal and state lawmakers have said, a settlement by Paramount may amount to illegal bribery.
The Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators — adopted by the American Bar Association, American Arbitration Association, and Association for Conflict Resolution — provide as follows: “If a mediation is being used to further criminal conduct, a mediator should take appropriate steps including, if necessary, postponing, withdrawing from or terminating the mediation.” The ethics guidelines of Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Services go a step further: “A mediator should withdraw from the process if the mediation is being used to further illegal conduct.“
The mediator’s identity hasn’t been publicly disclosed, but presumably, they’re a lawyer, also bound by the rules of professional conduct. Those rules also include obligations to uphold the integrity of the legal profession and not facilitate illegal conduct. Violations are punishable by discipline up to disbarment. That said, it should not require citation of specific rules and standards to establish that it’s improper to facilitate the abuse of the legal system to funnel bribes disguised as settlements to politicians.
Everyone knows the case is not worth $20 million, or even 20 cents, in terms of legal merit. It’s beyond frivolous — and that’s saying something given the myriad frivolous lawsuits Trump has filed. As Paramount’s own lawyers note, Trump often doesn’t even attempt to cite cases supporting his cockamamie legal theories or refuting the decades of First Amendment precedent that obviously protects CBS’ editorial judgment. Any first-year law student can see this case should be thrown out at the first opportunity. It’s a joke.
The Model Standards of Conduct for Mediators“If a mediation is being used to further criminal conduct, a mediator should take appropriate steps including, if necessary, postponing, withdrawing from or terminating the mediation.”
Yet it’s been widely reported that Paramount directors believe they need to pay up if they want Trump’s Federal Communications Commission to approve the Skydance merger. Possibly the only thing stopping them is the fact that the directors are reportedly concerned that settling could put it at risk of liability for bribery.
They should be worried. In addition to the lawmakers that have launched probes into potential criminality, as Paramount shareholders and defenders of press freedom, we’ve threatened to bring a shareholder derivative suit against Paramount directors and officers if the company pays Trump off, and retained counsel to do so on our behalf.
Any settlement agreed to by Paramount to facilitate its merger is not only tantamount to bribery but throws its own storied news outlet under the bus and invites Trump to extort countless other news corporations as soon as the check clears.
The Wall Street Journal reported that directors at Paramount have been mulling over a number it can offer that reduces the odds of a bribery case. When a party to a mediation is calculating settlement numbers not based on the merits of the lawsuit and cost of litigation but on the maximum it can pay without officers and directors getting indicted, that’s a gigantic red flag that no ethical mediator should ignore (as if investigations from federal and state lawmakers aren’t enough of a warning).
We hope the mediator is taking their obligations seriously. And we also hope Paramount directors are reading their own lawyers’ legal briefs. Editing interviews is something news outlets across the political spectrum do every hour of every day (even Trump-aligned Fox News hosts have openly acknowledged that). As Paramount’s lawyers wrote, if this case were to go forward, it “would amount to green-lighting thousands of consumer claims brought by individuals who merely disagree with a news organization’s editorial choices.”
The same can be said for if Paramount settles. Trump sued The Des Moines Register right after ABC owner Disney shamefully settled with Trump earlier this year. If he is gifted $20 million (and no, it doesn’t help matters if the money goes to his purported library foundation) for disliking the way an interview was edited, there’s no telling how many news outlets he’ll target next.
