It’s never particularly flattering to be compared to Richard Nixon in the throes of Watergate, but watching events unfold at CBS News — with President Wendy McMahon as the latest resignation and other abrupt exits as parent Paramount Global casts about for someone to perform extremely unsavory tasks — brings to mind what came to be known as Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.
For those in need of a refresher course, Nixon decided he wanted to oust Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, ordering Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire him. Both men refused and resigned, before then-Solicitor General Robert Bork (later unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court) agreed to carry out the firing, unleashing a firestorm that eventually led to calls for Nixon’s impeachment and his resignation.
The massacre at CBS News has unfolded at a slower pace, and it poses a slightly different but analogous dilemma. The pressure here has come in the face of President Trump’s relentless attacks on “60 Minutes,” its venerable newsmagazine, as part of his larger campaign against the press, and Paramount’s eagerness to mollify him in order to secure approval for its planned merger with Skydance Media.
CBS has already witnessed the departure of “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, and now CBS News President Wendy McMahon, raising this rather unsettling question: When you actually find someone willing to capitulate to Trump’s demands, from a journalistic standpoint, would you actually want those people running “60 Minutes” and CBS News?
Based on several published accounts, Paramount has already sought both to rein in “60 Minutes” in terms of its ongoing coverage of Trump, along with the news division’s acquiescence to help the studio reach a settlement in Trump’s $20-billion lawsuit against the program. One facet of a possible agreement would be a potential apology for a piece about then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris that, virtually everyone in the news business agrees, doesn’t warrant one.
In his memo to staff, Owens spoke of losing editorial independence, while McMahon stated that it has “become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.” While all the details haven’t been spelled out, it’s not particularly hard to connect the dots.
At some point, CBS will surely find somebody ambitious enough, like Bork, to comply with what’s required. But for the news division and “60 Minutes,” which is sure to suffer additional departures and resignations of key personnel should that happen, what then?
“People are outraged, and people are demoralized,” Judy Muller, a former CBS News and ABC News correspondent and professor emerita of journalism at USC, told TheWrap. “You don’t work your whole career to get to the pinnacle — which, to me, is ’60 Minutes’ — to be facing this. It’s just scandalous.”
Muller called the entire episode “shameful” and “sad,” adding that it will inflict irreparable damage to one of the assets Skydance is theoretically paying to acquire.
“I don’t think they can recover from it,” she said. “’60 Minutes’ will keep doing their job, as much as they can with whoever is in charge, but knowing that they’re under this hammer of political pressure, this is just not something that we would have thought was possible at another time.”
For Paramount, the issue appears to boil down less to circling the wagons on behalf of journalistic standards than sheer pragmatism, with an $8-billion merger hanging in the balance. That dynamic has made the studio uniquely vulnerable, although in terms of “bending the knee” to Trump and his hand-picked FCC chairman Brendan Carr, they’re hardly alone in exhibiting pliability at best, and a complete lack of backbone at worst.
John Oliver, the host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” singled out CBS — and Paramount chairwoman Shari Redstone — in a broader segment on Trump’s assault on the First Amendment on Sunday night, underscoring the reputational damage the network could suffer.
Oliver accurately called the teamwork between Trump and Carr “pretty flagrant,” with Trump filing lawsuits and Carr “making noises” about tightening the regulatory screws on those companies. The comic followed that with a clip of Redstone speaking a few years ago at an event for the Committee to Protect Journalists, in which she said that press freedom “must constantly be defended, and that it often comes at a significant cost, both personal and professional.”
“If media owners enjoy the applause they get when they say things like that,” Oliver concluded, “now is the time to pay for it.”
Others have sounded similar alarms, including nine U.S. senators who urged Redstone not to buckle. Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the signatories to that letter, reiterated those sentiments on X in response to McMahon’s departure, tweeting, “I say to Shari Redstone: Enough is enough. Do not capitulate to Trump’s attack on a free press. Do not settle Trump’s bogus lawsuit against ’60 Minutes.’”
Granted, not everyone is judging figures like Redstone quite so harshly, with mogul Barry Diller, for one, laying the blame squarely on Trump, expressing sympathy toward the company having “a guillotine” hanging over its head in a New York Times interview.
Ultimately, though, Trump is going to be Trump, and those who run afoul of his authoritarian efforts and instincts will be judged, individually and collectively, by how they responded in the moment. As Oliver and others have noted, caving in to Trump has also seemingly had the effect of emboldening him to seek further concessions as opposed to getting him to back off, so any short-term benefits will likely lead to more long-term headaches.
More than a half-century after Nixon’s resignation, history was kind to Richardson and Ruckelshaus. Unless Paramount has an unexpected change of heart (or spine), whoever winds up running CBS News and “60 Minutes,” based on what holding those jobs will apparently necessitate, probably won’t be so lucky.
— Sean Burch contributed to this story.
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