The Paramount Betrayal

Why you should cancel your subscription to the streaming service

Don’t miss the last paragraph of this post! —Ryan

I just canceled my subscription to Paramount+, and I think you should too.

Paramount is now the Paul Weiss of corporate media. Just as Paul Weiss will forever be known as the law firm that capitulated to a blatantly illegal executive order from Donald Trump, betraying its own lawyers, Paramount will be synonymous with the betrayal of its own news employees.

The relationship between American news organizations and the giant corporations that house them has been fragile for decades. Like so many things Trump is ruining, that relationship rested on voluntary agreements—i.e. norms.

One agreement, sometimes stated explicitly at the time of purchase, was that companies like Paramount that acquired crown-jewel news entities, such as “60 Minutes,” would honor their storied histories by serving as good financial shepherds, no matter the vicissitudes of the markets affecting the company’s bottom line. You can find statements to this effect when Condé Nast bought The New Yorker, when Rupert Murdoch bought The Wall Street Journal, and when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post.

While it was never perfect, there also existed a generally respected promise of non-interference that created an invisible wall between the editorial and business sides at most of these corporations. If violations of this agreement became public, they often came at great cost in terms of staff resignations, widespread shaming from news competitors, and the loss of trust from news consumers.

The separation of church and state inside newsrooms is one of the great liberal norms of post-war America.

Paramount just treated it like toilet paper.

To recap: Donald Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit against “60 Minutes,” the flagship news program of CBS News, which is owned by Paramount. Nobody who is familiar with First Amendment law took the suit seriously, including CBS’s attorneys, who argued that it was meritless and absurd.

But Paramount is in the process of a $28 billion merger with Skydance, and the Trump administration leveraged its regulatory power—the FCC has to approve the transfer of CBS’s broadcast licenses—to coerce a settlement from Paramount, which, despite two resignations from senior “60 Minutes” executives and widespread warnings from news colleagues everywhere, caved into Trump’s demands and agreed to pay $16 million to Trump’s future presidential library. In addition, there’s a secret side deal, the details of which are still shrouded in mystery, that may be even worse than the millions Paramount will cough up.

The damage is enormous. “60 Minutes,” which did nothing wrong, has been humiliated, and to millions of the president’s rabid fans, it is now seen as admitting guilt to purposely harming Trump with distorted coverage in 2024. CBS News’ employees will no doubt think twice before producing any tough coverage of Trump, especially before the merger with Skydance is completed. And the president has now learned how easy it is to use the regulatory power of the state to tame a press he describes as “the enemy of the people” and that he has systematically tried to defang. He will be back with more absurd lawsuits and regulatory coercion.

I feel for the editorial employees at CBS. I have personal experience of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of legal threats, both when a media company does the right thing—and when it caves. In 2019, Devin Nunes sued me and Esquire for defamation over a story I had written when I was the magazine’s chief political correspondent in 2018.

I watched with enormous gratitude as Hearst, Esquire’s corporate parent, defended the suit for over five years at the cost of millions of dollars, and eventually prevailed, exactly as the company’s lawyers promised me they would on the first day the suit was filed. They spared no expense defending me and Esquire, and if they ever even considered settling it to make it go away, they never shared that with me.

I have also been inside a newsroom owned by an international conglomerate where legal threats from high-ranking officials are met with passivity and bent knees (that’s a story for another day).

Unfortunately, Paramount is a harbinger of things to come. Trump has figured out how to pick the lock of the media. Journalists themselves are often an ornery bunch craving principled fights. Trump’s pressure campaigns against them as individuals often backfire. But now he knows that he can harass their corporate parents, and with surprising ease, extract cash and pressure them to keep their coverage tame.

So I don’t think I’ll be subscribing to Paramount+ again anytime soon. This entire episode has reminded me why I’m grateful for the independent media renaissance happening here on Substack and elsewhere.

But Paramount’s despicable treatment of “60 Minutes” did give me an idea. Maybe more of us should cancel those Paramount+ subscriptions. In fact, if you send me a screenshot, like the one above, confirming a canceled Paramount+ account, I’ll give you 30% off a one-year subscription to Telos News. In my humble opinion, it’s money better spent. And who knows? Maybe other Substackers will follow suit with this deal, and a little revolt against the Paramount betrayal will take root here on this platform.