If you rely on the protection of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution in order to make a living, today is a bad day.
Yes, you, even you wearing the red hat, metaphorically or otherwise. Even if you like the immigration policies or tax cuts or whatever, the legal settlement between the President of the United States and the parent company of CBS News should be troubling. If it happened in any other country or with any other President, you would call it a “payoff” or “corruption” and you would be correct. There are no valid “whatabouts” here.
Yes, $16 million is, relatively speaking, not a whole lot of money when it comes to a nearly $29 billion company. That’s true. But it’s also not the point.
The point is that a Presidential candidate chose not to participate in a “60 Minutes” interview before the election.
Ask anyone in the PR or news businesses and they’ll tell you the same thing – that’s the right of anyone who is offered an interview. But if you make that choice, you also, well, at least before now, give up the right to be able to do anything about the story if you don’t like it. He sued anyway.
At the same time, and I write this as succinctly as possible after 30+ years of conversations about this subject with lawyers and other experts, if you can’t show damages, you can’t win a lawsuit about a news story. In this case, the supposedly aggrieved candidate was the one who won the election. That’s why everyone paying attention knew that this case wasn’t worth a penny. Simply put, there was no damage.
But in order for CBS’ owner to sell the company, it needs FCC approval. The FCC’s Chair pledges loyalty to the President in ways we’ve never seen before (check out his lapel pin). So the President gets his money and Paramount will now get its sale.
It doesn’t have to stretch the imagination to consider where things go from here, because we are already here. If a news organization does a story the President doesn’t like, he’ll use the litigation process and levers of government to get paid. During that process, there’s collateral damage as journalists flee the organization, and maybe the profession, weakening the news organization while its credibility suffers among audiences that actually care about news.
Nobody can say anymore that anyone in communications is safe from this type of litigation combined with regulatory action. Between what happened with ABC News, this CBS case, the efforts to defund public media, this is not isolated. This is a trend.
What can you do about it? Support the news organizations you trust. Subscribe if you have to, as they might need the money for litigation defending themselves against the government. If you’re on the PR side, talk to lawyers you trust about how standards are changing, at least for the President or wannabes at other levels of government.
If nothing else, remember this day.