Shari Redstone's Loss of Courage
The $8 billion deal to sell Paramount to Skydance might have already gotten a green light if she had played hardball with Trump instead of coming down hard on '60 Minutes'
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that $15 million has been offered to settle a frivolous $20 billion lawsuit President Trump brought against CBS News, which is among the many assets owned by Paramount Global. The Grifter-in-Chief’s beef: 60 Minutes, he says, edited a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris to make better sense out of some her word-salad answers.
But $15 mil won’t cut it, the Journal’s sources said: Trump wants more than $25 million, plus an apology from CBS.
A week or so earlier, Senators Liz Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) begged Paramount Chair Shari Redstone not to pay tribute to Don(ald) Corleone, saying to do so might amount to bribery. Why? Because the off-again, on-again $8 billion deal to sell Paramount to Skydance Media and lesser investors is being held up by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission. The cash could make sure the deal gets approved and maybe even fast-tracked.
Never mind that you don’t have to be a journalist to know that interviews — no matter what the medium — are edited for sense and style. Anyone who reads, watches TV, listens to radio, or breathes on their own realizes that. More important, perhaps, Harris lost.
It’s a garbage suit. As a former high-level Paramount executive told The Constant Tribune, it would have gone away with a phone call if Shari’s father were still alive and running the show — all without roiling CBS. “Sumner would be calling up Trump and schmoozing, and they’d come to an agreement,” he said.
Since taking office, Trump has shaken down Disney-owned ABC and put the arm on high-powered law firms (which, it has been revealed, have the guts of a butterfly, as Gore Vidal famously said of Truman Capote). So he now feels emboldened to demand payment from Paramount to go away again.
Redstone claims to have recused herself from the negotiations. Cue up the laugh track. Not only does Shari chair the Paramount board, which she has downsized to four women cronies and herself, but she directly controls National Amusements, the holding company Sumner Redstone started with a handful of drive-in movie theaters and built into a media empire. Any settlement between Trump and 60 Minutes would require her sign-off.
Meanwhile, she has been turning up the heat on television’s most revered news show, 60 Minutes.
"Paramount appears to have begun overseeing CBS's content, presumably in order to screen it for content that could anger the Trump Administration," the senators said in their letter to her.
In late April, longtime 60 Minutes Executive Producer Bill Owens resigned, telling his staff, according to The New York Times, “Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience.”
Owens alluded to new layers of oversight that were in sharp contrast to the past trust the corporation had placed in 60 Minutes to report the news as it saw fit.
On May 19, CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon was forced out, writing in a memo to employees, “It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on a path forward.”
60 Minutes correspondents haven’t hidden their grief, and Scott Pelley seemed to speak for his colleagues when he said on the broadcast following Owens’ resignation: “Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it. Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways. …No one here is happy about it. But in resigning, Bill proved one thing — he was the right person to lead 60 Minutes all along.”
Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For Dept.
With the determination of a frantic beaver, Shari Redstone had by 2020 swatted away the gold-digging floozies around her dying father, taken control of National Amusements, gotten lucky when CBS CEO Les Moonves — who had opposed her plan to reunite Viacom and CBS under the Paramount umbrella — fell into the #MeToo career grinder, and had become what she had always wanted to be: A Hollywood player.
But it has been pretty much all downhill since then. In 2019, the market cap of Paramount Global was almost $26 billion. Its market cap as of today close was $8.58 billion.
Shari’s “business instincts are not great,” the former Paramount exec said. “She has made bad calls all the way along because [business] is not her forte, [and] she picks bad advisors. She uses lawyers as intermediaries, and that’s not how to deal with Trump.”
The Qataris, he added in reference to the $400 million plane gifted to the President for use as Air Force One, “know how to kiss his rear end.”
And, the exec pointed out, “There was no need to raise hackles at CBS.” In fact, he went on, “you could say that if she were tougher with Trump, the more he’d like to have CBS taken over by a friend and would push the merger along.”
He was referring to the realpolitik of the situation. David Ellison is the CEO of Skydance. David’s father, the $175 billion moneybags behind the buyout, is Larry Ellison. The Oracle Corp. founder, once a centrist, is now a major Republican donor and has become close to Trump. (Recently, the President said he would be happy if Larry took over TikTok.)
The people advising Shari are getting played, the exec agreed.
Will the deal eventually go through? “Mergers are unpredictable,” he said, adding that “Trump is not above telling [the FCC] to go slow.” However, he suggested another six months as a reasonable time frame for the deal to close.
Meantime, the exec said, “The troops are eagerly awaiting Ellison.”