Transcript: Trump’s Vile New Colbert Smear Reveals Firing’s Darker Aim

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 21 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

By now you’ve heard that CBS has cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. What makes this even more troubling is that it comes just after Paramount, which owns CBS, settled a lawsuit with President Trump by paying out $16 million in what many are describing as functionally a bribe. CBS denies that it ended Colbert’s show to curry favor with Trump, claiming it’s a purely financial decision, but the firing comes after Colbert himself called the settlement with Trump a “big fat bribe.” And now Trump just praised the decision to fire Colbert in a vile attack he unleashed on Colbert which claimed he has no talent and can’t measure up to the brilliant minds of Fox News. We’re talking about all this today with Michael Sozan, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who recently had a good piece spelling out the dangers of Paramount’s settlement with Trump. Michael, good to have you on.

Michael Sozan: Good to be on with you, Greg. Thanks.

Sargent: Let’s back up a bit and start with Paramount’s settlement with Trump. This came after Trump sued CBS, accusing it of deceptive editing. It was a preposterous claim, and many legal experts said CBS would have won if it had litigated—but Paramount settled instead. Can you walk us through why that itself is so disturbing?

Sozan: That case was the flimsiest of cases from the very beginning when Donald Trump brought it. You might remember he sued for $20 billion with a “B,” which was just insane from the beginning. And all the legal experts had said, Look, of course, news entities have the First Amendment right to edit interviews the way that they want to. And so from the beginning, that suit should have been laughed out of court. And actually, Paramount itself—its lawyers continued to argue in court documents that this was an absurd case that wasn’t founded in the law at all. And Trump kept on it day after day, demanding that there be some settlement. And the parties did enter into settlement negotiations. It was reported that Paramount’s board was really actually worried and was discussing whether a settlement could amount to bribery. So they knew that it was a risk. Their shareholders and others—First Amendment people—were arguing, telling them, Please do not settle. They ultimately did anyway, just a few weeks ago, for at least $16 million.

Sargent: And Paramount had other potential reasons for settling, right? Can you talk about that side of it?

Sozan: Exactly right. And this is why some people were raising this issue of potential bribery. So there was, on the one hand, this lawsuit that Trump had brought that we just discussed. Simultaneously, unfortunately for Paramount-CBS, they are trying to get a merger approved by the Federal Communications Commission. That’s the agency that oversees telecommunications, media entities and their licenses. And the FCC is now run by a very close ally of Donald Trump named Brendan Carr. Brendan Carr had slowed down the merger proceedings and had accused CBS perhaps of engaging in news distortion from when it edited the 60 Minutes interview. So things were ground to a halt over at the FCC. And Carr was trying to say that the Trump lawsuit was not related, but most people thought obviously it was. The heads of Paramount really wanted to get this merger done, and they clearly saw—at least it appears to most of us—that settling the unrelated lawsuit with Trump would be a way to unlock the merger and finally get it approved by the FCC.