CBS’ ’60 Minutes’ Is Unflinching in Its White House Coverage in the Shadow of Trump’s $20B Lawsuit

NEW YORK (AP) — As CBS corporate leaders ponder settling President Donald Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against the network’s “60 Minutes,” America’s storied newsmagazine has produced some fast and hard-hitting stories critical of the new administration in every episode since Trump was inaugurated.

The latest was Sunday, when CBS News helped pay for a performance featuring non-white middle and high school musicians who had won a contest and with it, the right to play with the U.S. Marine Corps Band. The original concert, however, was canceled because of Trump’s executive order ending diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Correspondent Scott Pelley narrated six of the show’s seven stories since Trump’s inauguration, including Sunday’s. He examined the administration’s policies toward Ukraine and tariffs, looked at changes in the Justice Department and reported on firings of government watchdogs. Shortly after his piece on the dismantling of USAID, Elon Musk suggested “long prison sentences” for those working on the show.

All came at a time when television’s most popular and influential news broadcast was being watched to see how it would respond to a unique pressure.

“This may be a lawsuit that is designed to intimidate, but they are clearly making a statement that they will not be intimidated,” said Tom Bettag, a longtime television news producer who worked under Mike Wallace and Morley Safer at the CBS show.

Pelley, meanwhile, has quickly become a polarizing figure.

“Another week, another ‘60 Minutes’ story trying to discredit Trump policies,” Brent Baker, editor of the conservative media watchdog NewsBusters, wrote on X on Sunday night.

The Context Surrounding the ‘60 Minutes’ Reports

Trump’s lawsuit, coupled with a parallel Federal Communications Commission investigation, accuses “60 Minutes” of election interference for the way it edited Bill Whitaker’s interview last fall with Trump’s 2024 opponent, Kamala Harris.

Two sound bites, broadcast on “60 Minutes” and CBS’ “Face the Nation,” depicted Harris giving different responses to Whitaker in a discussion about Israel. CBS said Harris made both comments in her answer to Whitaker and that the two shows ended up using different parts of a long sound bite. CBS argued the apparent discrepancy was typical of editing and not, as Trump has suggested, that different remarks by Harris were used to make her look better.

CBS parent Paramount Global filed new motions in the past two weeks to get both the lawsuit and the FCC probe dismissed. Still, Shari Redstone, head of Paramount, is reportedly anxious for a settlement, much like Disney agreed to pay $16 million in December to end Trump’s lawsuit against ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. Complicating matters is Paramount’s proposed merger with Skydance Media, which needs approval from the Trump administration.

Many at CBS News resist a settlement, insisting “60 Minutes” did nothing wrong. The show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, told his staff last month that he would not apologize as part of any prospective settlement.

“My precious ‘60 Minutes’ is fighting, quite frankly, for our life,” correspondent Lesley Stahl said earlier this month in accepting a First Amendment award from the Radio Television Digital News Association. “I am so proud of ‘60 Minutes’ that we are standing up and fighting for what is right.”

Neither Owens nor Pelley would comment on whether the show is trying to deliver any sort of message about the lawsuit through its work. Bettag said he believed “60 Minutes” is motivated by the importance of the stories.

What the show has done during the past two months is striking, said Bettag, now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

“The ‘60 Minutes’ people are such committed journalists that they’d consider it foolish to be doing these stories because of what is a frivolous lawsuit,” he said. “The lawsuit pales in comparison with the monumental changes Trump is trying to implement. Those correspondents and producers know that this is a moment that requires their very best work.”

Some of the segments were unusually urgent for the newsmagazine, which tends to do longer-range stories that could take months to produce. Pelley’s March 2 report about Ukraine came only days after the White House confrontation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Musk’s angry comment on his X social media platform came after Pelley’s Feb. 16 story about the billionaire’s role in the quick shutdown of the USAID office. “The world’s richest man had cut off assistance to the world’s poorest families,” Pelley said, noting that Musk collects “billions of taxpayer dollars” for his SpaceX company.

Hours later, Musk wrote on X: “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”

Other news organizations have done admirable work under difficult circumstances, said Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University journalism professor. Besides Pelley, he cited the news staff of the Washington Post at a time the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has shown more friendliness to Trump.

‘The Concert That Was not Meant to Be Heard’

Sunday’s “60 Minutes” story involved some elite high school students — each of them either of either Black, Hispanic, Indian or Asian descent — who had earned the right to play with the Marine band before the show was called off.

CBS worked with Equity Arc, an organization devoted to increasing the number of minority students playing classical music, to organize a show for family and friends of the students outside Washington, D.C.. Retired members of military bands were brought in to work with the students. CBS News, which wanted to interview the students, paid for the travel and lodging of 22 of them.

Pelley called it the “concert that was not meant to be heard.”

“The original Marine Band concert would have been seen by hundreds,” he said. “Here tonight, these musicians are being heard by millions.”

Pelley’s March 9 report, “Firing the Watchdogs,” was about Trump’s efforts to fire inspector generals and thwart others who protect whistleblowers in government agencies. He quoted Trump as saying the firings were standard for a new administration taking office. “He’s wrong,” Pelley said.

His story about the U.S. Justice Department examined the resistance among some prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

“As he continues to step up his attacks on President Donald Trump and the new administration, Pelley is elbowing aside all others to emerge as Trump’s loudest TV critic,” wrote Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner.

In his stories, Pelley’s deadpan voice and methodical style could not hide the sharpness of some observations. While narrating the story about USAID, Pelley noted that “It’s too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution.”