CBS Gave US ALL the Middle Finger…MEIDAS RESPONDS!! MeidasTouch Network and Ben Meiselas May 20 By Ben Meiselas I had a great birthday yesterday, but now I am taking the gloves off. I am pissed off!! It appears that CBS and its parent company Paramount are moving closer to settling a BS lawsuit filed by Donald Trump—to pay Trump directly as a quid pro quo for the U.S. government approving the merger between Paramount and a company called Skydance. The merger would put approximately $5 billion in cash into the hands of Paramount shareholders, including its controlling shareholder Shari Redstone. Shari Redstone inherited Paramount—once called Viacom—from her dad, Sumner Redstone. Shari wants to sell her shares to Skydance so she can make billions. The merger requires approval by various United States government agencies, like the FCC. Trump’s FCC has threatened to withhold approval of the merger. Trump personally sued Paramount and CBS (which owns 60 Minutes) in Texas federal court, forum-shopping to get a Trump-appointed judge. He claims he was injured under Texas consumer laws because 60 Minutes lightly edited its interview with former VP Kamala Harris in October 2024. Trump was too scared to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes in this election cycle. Yet he claims he was injured to the tune of $20 billion based on how CBS presented its interview with Kamala Harris. In my opinion, it’s the dumbest and most frivolous lawsuit imaginable. In normal times, a lawsuit like this would be met with massive sanctions for vexatious litigation. But in the age of Trump, it’s now a shakedown tool—to demand personal settlements to enrich himself and use the levers of government approval processes to effectuate the shakedown. Yesterday, Wendy McMahon, the president and head of CBS News, resigned in protest because CBS’s corporate owners at Paramount want to cave to Trump. This follows Bill Owens, the head producer of 60 Minutes, resigning in protest a few weeks back for the same reason. There was a mediation held a few weeks back between Trump and Paramount to settle Trump’s BS lawsuit. My sources tell me a mediator proposal was made to settle the case. I hear Paramount desperately wants to accept the proposal and settle with Trump to complete their merger with Skydance—but their big hurdle was people like Owens, and especially McMahon, who rightfully view any settlement with Trump as the death of CBS News. I’ve seen various reports over the past 24 hours that confirm what I’ve heard: that the settlement range is between $30–50 million that Paramount is willing to pay Trump directly to clear the path for their $5 billion merger. This is so utterly pathetic and fascistic! First, I want to say I applaud the decisions of Bill Owens and Wendy McMahon for resigning in protest. While I doubt I could offer the same salaries you got at CBS, we’d love to discuss roles for you at the MeidasTouch Network. We are a subscriber-funded network from this Substack, and we don’t get our orders from anyone—especially not right-wing oligarchs. Have your people call my people. In other words, Bill and Wendy, email me. We are the most viewed independent media network in the world, and far more people watch us than CBS on digital platforms anyway. Second, as I reflect on what CBS is doing, I guess they are just making more MeidasTouch viewers. Whether it’s CBS and Paramount caving and kissing the ring, or other corporate news doing defamatory and despicable coverage of Biden while covering up for Trump, corporate news’s decline is MeidasTouch Network’s gain. Our original, independent, fearless reporting is the future of news. These oligarch-funded Trump enablers are writing their own obituaries by chasing Trump down the depths of depravity and lies. Third, even if the MeidasTouch Network benefits from the failures of corporate news like CBS, it doesn’t mean I root for their failure. I loved 60 Minutes under the leadership of Bill Owens and Wendy McMahon. There are still some good newscasters who shouldn’t be lumped in with the capitulating class—people who are fighting for their editorial independence each day and still doing good work, albeit in hostile work environments. I respect the craft of good journalism. I don’t like seeing CBS cave to Trump. I don’t like seeing their corporate overlords destroy the legacy of newsrooms that once did good reporting. But fourth, and finally, I go back to the MeidasTouch Network’s vision. We are independent. We are not beholden to right-wing oligarchs. Our only stakeholders are you—the MeidasMighty, the subscribers to this Substack. That’s why your subscriptions to this Substack are so incredibly valuable. It not only gives you access to content—it empowers the MeidasTouch Network to exist, thrive, and build a newsroom that fights fascism fearlessly and without the slightest hesitation. It’s why I always say: we need you to subscribe now to this Substack if you can. So when CBS and Paramount give us the middle finger, we give them our data. And our data shows that we are kicking their ass in digital views and downloads—and it’s not even close. I want to be able to expand MeidasTouch to one day acquire a show like 60 Minutes. I know we can do it. I know that we have laid the foundation to truly revolutionize the media, and build something that will be a force for good. I’ll leave you with this anecdote: Our coverage of the Romanian election this weekend was a major story within Romania. A headline from a popular Romanian website described how America’s top podcast and news network (the MeidasTouch Network) devoted attention to the victory by pro-democracy forces in the Romanian election, as the Trump-aligned candidate got upset. Whether it’s here in the USA, or in Canada, Australia, Romania, Poland, India—wherever—the MeidasTouch Network is bringing people together to support democracy and normalcy, and fight back against fascism around the world. And this is all happening at the same time American corporate news is consolidating under a corrosive state regime banner. I am not afraid of being arrested by Trump. Not to get morbid, but I am not afraid of being killed by Trump or his minions. I don’t fear this regime. I know my mission and my purpose, and I am laser-focused on that. I am putting it all out there. I will not look back and say I could have done this or that. But I can’t do it alone. We need your help. It’s now or never. Now’s the moment. Share this network with everyone now. Tell them about the MeidasTouch Network. Send them our live podcast from last night. Let me know in the comments how many people you referred to the MeidasTouch Network. In fact, let’s make it a competition and see who told the most people to watch our show from last night. Let me know in the comments. And finally—subscribe now to this Substack or gift subscriptions to people you know. We can send a powerful message to CBS and other cable news by growing this Substack bigger than anyone expects. Hit subscribe now. Thanks for subscribing—and thanks for spreading the word. Meidas+ is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

Trump Versus The Press Joyce Vance May 20 Today, The New York Times reported that CBS News president Wendy McMahon was forced out of her job, a lingering side effect of the “60 Minutes” debacle. The Times attributes the situation to the “ongoing showdown involving President Trump, CBS and its parent company, Paramount,” which is trying to settle Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit accusing “60 Minutes” of “deceptively editing” and interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign. The scales of justice, in the entrance to the Boston Public Library. The lawsuit is fanciful, the stuff of motions to dismiss, not settlements, but there is reporting that Paramount’s controlling shareholder wants to resolve it to facilitate government approval for a high-stakes corporate transaction she is in the middle of. In a memo to her staff, McMahon wrote, “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” In April, Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” resigned. He expressed concerns about journalistic independence. McMahon backed Owens at the time, saying publicly that “standing behind” him had been an “easy decision” for her—apparently leading to her ultimate separation from CBS. On January 16, 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Edward Carrington, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress from Virginia, advocating for the importance of a free press: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. but I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.” Those words take on enhanced meaning in an era of rampant misinformation and disinformation, some of it deliberately being pushed out for political purposes. “The basis for our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right.” It has never been more important to keep and support a free press than now. Trump went on the attack against the press even before his January 2025 inauguration. In December 2024, ABC paid him $15 million to settle allegations that George Stephanopolous defamed Trump by saying on air that he had been held liable for raping E. Jean Carroll, when in fact, the jury had found, under New York law, that there had been a sexual assault. Under New York law, digital penetration is deemed sexual assault, not rape, although it is often publicly equated with, and treated by other states’ legal systems as the latter. The Law Journal editorial board concluded that a voluntary payment of such a high amount was questionable: “While at first glance the settlement resembles more the capitulation of a huge entertainment company facing the specter of the incoming administration’s threats to undermine the media than it does an effort to provide compensation for true reputational damage, a closer look reveals that, while it may have avoided significant risk for Disney, it also provides compensation far beyond any actual reputational damages for Trump: it creates a bad precedent in uncertain times for a tattered and beaten news media under attack from many quarters.” It’s unlikely the settlement would have taken place on these terms if Trump had lost the election. Also in December, Trump sued Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for consumer fraud, alleging she rigged an Iowa poll to influence the 2024 election. Trump attacked Selzer, saying, “In my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference. You know, she's got me right always. She's a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing.” Selzer, a highly reputed pollster, thought Harris was up on the eve of the election. Trump attacked the press over 100 times during the campaign. Newspapers like The Washington Post and L.A. Times embarrassed themselves by bending the knee. After assuming office, he shut out the AP from Oval Office and Air Force One coverage because they had the temerity to refuse to follow Trump’s dictate that the Gulf of Mexico should henceforth be known as the Gulf of America. The press should not go hat in hand to a president to settle lawsuits or beg for access. A president shouldn’t expect that. But Trump does, and it puts an ever more serious onus on the press to live up, despite the peril to their access they need to cover the news, to journalistic standards. It is their job to report on what happens, not what the president or anyone else wants them to. And although they have taken a lot of hits in the time of Trump, some of them well deserved, they are still essential to the national well-being. This country relies on a free and independent press; it’s built on it. The Founding Fathers knew that. That’s why the first thing would-be dictators do is go after a free press, if it exists in their country. That’s what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who by early 2018 was being labeled a “soft” autocrat, did. At CPAC in 2022 he told American conservatives “Have your own media,” claiming Western media presented a “leftist” viewpoint. Tucker Carlson praised Orban’s Hungary in a video that was played at the summit as a roadmap for the U.S. The Guardian reported that “Journalists from international media outlets, including the New Yorker, Vox Media, Vice News, Rolling Stone, and the Associated Press, were denied access to the event despite months of requests.” The AP captioned its 2024 report on the state of the press in Hungary like this, “How Hungary’s Orbán uses control of the media to escape scrutiny and keep the public in the dark.” Orbán is the last man who should be giving an American president advice, but Trump continues to praise him. Julian E. Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton, has written about another time in our history where newspaper owners stood up to a president: “We have seen this struggle play out before. During the early 1970s, another president, Richard Nixon, brought his institutional muscle down to bear on the press. In his case, the outcome became a vital moment that ensured, for decades, that news coverage of elected officials remained vigilant and free.” The press did that by publishing The Pentagon Papers. As Nixon tried to prevent further publications, the case reached the Supreme Court. Justice Hugo Black wrote that only “a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.” Professor Zelizer’s full piece is good reading on this topic. The need for clear-eyed reporting has never been greater, and the threat of deception of Americans is far from over. Trump’s FBI Director, Kash Patel, said on a 2023 podcast with Steve Bannon that if he had the power to, he would “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued in No. 84 that freedom of the press is essential for holding power accountable. He believed the press would provide such a strong check against government abuse that a bill of rights containing the First Amendment was unnecessary. Fortunately, he was outvoted in that regard, and the First Amendment continues to guarantee important rights in the face of a president who would otherwise opt to restrict many of them. When the press gets attacked, it’s the people who lose. Making sure Americans have access to truthful information and thoughtful analysis so they can make up their own minds on the issues is essential in this moment. We’re doing some of the heavy lifting on that here, and I’m grateful you’re with me. We’re in this together, Joyce