Longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft, now retired, dished on how his former colleagues are handling their parent company’s $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump over an interview he baselessly claimed to be deceptively edited.
The decision to settle has put a dent in morale among CBS News’ journalists, Kroft told Jon Stewart on a Monday night episode of “The Daily Show.”
But Trump regards the situation much differently, Kroft said.
“The $16 million was tribute. That’s how he looks at it,” he told Stewart at one point. “Tribute to the king.”
The so-called tribute may play a factor in the proposed merger between CBS News’ parent company, Paramount Global, and Skydance Media.
“Yeah, it was a shakedown. That’s what I’d call it,” Kroft said of the payment. “Some people call it extortion. That’s a legal term. ‘Shakedown’ is more colloquial.”
Stewart jumped in: “Obviously, this is opinion. Is this purely Paramount buying their way? They are being sold right now to a gentleman who is friends with the president, Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison, Skydance. Was this settlement just a payment so that this merger can go through and not be challenged by Trump’s FCC?”
Kroft said Trump was trying to settle a score with “60 Minutes” and suggested he is indeed using the Federal Communications Commission to do it.
“Now, that strikes me as — and I’m obviously not a lawyer. But I did watch ‘Goodfellas,’” Stewart joked. “That sounds illegal.”
“Yes, it does,” Kroft said. “I think it is illegal. I think it’s a shakedown.”
At another point, Kroft acknowledged that he was still in the loop on internal gossip at CBS News, and said he agreed with Stewart that the settlement was “devastating” to people there with a mission to produce good journalism.
“‘Devastating’ is a good word,” Kroft said, adding that he thinks there is “a lot of fear” in the newsroom.
“Fear of losing their job. Fear of what’s happening to the country. Fear of losing the First Amendment. All of those things,” he said.
The “60 Minutes” interview in question featured former Vice President Kamala Harris and aired last fall during her bid for the presidency. The network aired a portion of her response to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a morning show, and a different portion of her response during “60 Minutes” when it aired in the evening.
Trump thought the part included in the actual program made Harris look better. He went so far as to suggest CBS News was trying to manipulate the election in her favor. Notably, however, the settlement with the network did not include an apology to Trump.
Stewart showed an example of a truly deceptive edit: a Fox News interview with Trump that cut out his full response to a question on whether he would declassify files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump responded, “Yeah, yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so because, you know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phony stuff in there because there’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”
Fox News cropped his answer after, “Yeah, yeah, I would.”
Watch the whole interview below.