Bob Costas blasted President Trump’s lawsuits against media companies — and the executives who are buckling under them rather than fighting back. “The free press is under attack. Democracy as we know it is under attack,” Costas said Monday night.
Costas, who retired from play-by-play game coverage in 2024 after a 44-year career as a journalist and sportscaster, made the remarks while accepting the lifetime achievement Mirror Award from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School at the Edison Ballroom in New York.
The Emmy winner didn’t mince words when it came to ABC’s decision to pay a $15 million settlement to Trump rather than contest the president’s claims in court. “All they should have said was George misspoke. They didn’t have to pay a $15 million ransom.”
Costas also had harsh words for Paramount chief Shari Redstone, who has already offered Trump $15 million to settle his $200 billion lawsuit over his allegation that CBS edited a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, a settlement that the president declined last month.
“Did Shari Redstone — because she wants to effect a merger that Trump’s FCC could stand in the way of — did she have to besmirch and undercut the gold standard in our lifetime of broadcast journalism, ‘60 Minutes?’” he said, referring to the pending merger between Paramount and Skydance.
“Paying $20 million in ransom to Trump is just the cost of doing business when there’s billions of dollars at stake,” Costas said.
“What’s happening now are not matters of small degree,” he continued, saying that these lawsuits, and Trump’s banning news outlets he dislikes from the Oval Office, as well as efforts to shut down PBS, NPR and the Voice of America, are “different in kind to anything certainly in my lifetime and maybe in the history of the American presidency.”
“These are ongoing assaults on the basic idea of a free press,” he said.
You can watch Costas’ speech in the embedded video above.
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