Long 60 minutes The correspondent Lesley Stahl fully expects a “frivolous” trial of $ 20 billion in Donald Trump, but she dreads what will follow the case.
“I’m already starting to think of mourning, in mourning,” said Stahl in an interview with Podcast with New York Editor David Remnick. “I know there will be a regulation,” she added, and “I know that there will be money exchanged” since Shari Redstone, controlling the shareholder of the Parent de CBS Paramant Global, needs government approval for waiting with Skydance. (Deadline reported Wednesday that Paramount had made an eight -digit regulations offer, which was rejected by Trump.)
After the regulation, Stahl speculated: “We hope we will always be there, turning a new page and discover what this new page will look like.”
Trump brought an action during a pre-electoral episode of 60 minutes Even after defeating Kamala Harris and won the re -election last November. He claims that CBS News has done him wrong by serving different modifications to an interview with Harris at different CBS outlets during the promotion of the segment, which is a standard practice in television information. Legal experts universally agree that there is no merit in the complaint, but a number of media have recently made their parents of companies have paid regulations or otherwise capitulated in Trump after having applied pressure.
Stahl’s comments on New York radio time Come as a uncertainty about the best rated CBS News-Magazine continues to rise. The long -standing executive producer Bill Owens left in April, citing the pressure from Redstone and other business leaders concerned by Trump’s coverage by the program. CBS news chief Wendy McMahon also recently left.
Stahl described Owens’ departure as “a punch in the stomach…. One of those punches where you can hardly breathe. ” Owens urged employees not to stop and to continue to defend difficult coverage despite Trump’s muzzle efforts. His pleadings came while employees openly discussed a “mass” outing of the program, according to Stahl.
Asked if she would expect 60 minutes To change “radically” under the control of Skydance, Stahl said that she hoped that the CEO of Skydance, David Ellison and his management team, “hold press freedom as a tag, that they understand the importance of allowing us to be independent and do our job. I expect that, I hope I want me to pray for it. ”
Remnick asked if there is “a lot of optimism … 60 minutes That it will be the result “, and Stahl replied:” No. But there is not much dark thought either either.
Throughout the interview, Stahl deplored the constant decline of public confidence in the media, which was amplified by Trump’s tactics. When she put him once on his intense combative position with journalists, he told him that he operated in this way so that when the negative relationships on him make surfaces, “no one will believe you.” The explanation “sent a thrill through me because I thought:” Wow, he thought “, she said. “It is not something that is a relaxed and angry mood” because “the press said something yesterday about me”. It was thought, it was a strategy. »»
Stahl described having “pain in my heart” about the state of his profession more than five decades after joining CBS News to cover Watergate. (After joining CBS in 1972, she was 60 minutes In 1991.) The average citizen “does not appreciate the importance of a free and strong and difficult press in our democracy,” she said. They do not understand “that we have a function to fulfill,” she added. “The public does not seem to want what we are being part of our public life.”
