’60 minutes’ or Paramount Global?

Shari Redstone is undoubtedly familiar with ‘The Godfather, part II’. After all, it is one of the most famous films in the Library of Paramount Global, the company she and her family control. Redstone probably doesn’t have time to view the 1974 classic this week, but it doesn’t matter. She lives it.

“The Godfather, part II” focuses on the difficult choices of protagonist Michael Corleone, who chooses to maintain the illegal corporate empire of his family instead of meeting the needs of the actual members of his family. He spends his time on jockey with rivals and to defend competitors, and loses his husband in the process and kills his brother, whose weaknesses give enemies the opportunity to address destruction.

Redstone is not a crime boss, but she is confronted with similar key decisions about doing what is best for members of the Paramount Family and what is best for her own family business.

One of the most appreciated properties in the Paramount portfolio is the venerable CBS News magazine “60 minutes”. The program is in the center of a thin but effective legal Feint by President Donald Trump for months. According to the case, submitted to the federal court in the Northern district of Texas in November 2024, “60 minutes” tried to mislead voters by performing two different operations in an interview with former vice -president Kamala Harris, then Trump’s rival for the White House. Legal experts believe that the president has little state. Intriguring, the report, which was broadcast in October, is nominated for an Emmy this week.

But the Trump right – in which the president $ 20 billion is looking for monetary damage due to CBS – has remained a problem. Instead of combating a nuisance, Paramount Mediates with Trump’s lawyers, all as Redstone hopes to get closer to the sale of the company to Skydance Media -and pushing the deal beyond the assessment of a FCC controlled by Trump, who also opened research into the “60 minutes” case. A completed deal will be a distracting one of the majority with new capital, because it wants to adapt to an industry in which cable networks – a large part of the company’s portfolio – are made outdated by streaming services.

In such a unique situation, business leaders are more likely to prefer the general activities, says Anant Sundaram, a professor at the Tuck School of Business of Dartmouth University who studies mergers and acquisitions. Once a deal has been revealed, Sundaram says: “The CEO wants to get it done yesterday before so many factors can start.” The current situation of Paramount, he adds, brings “the kind of uncertainty that a CEO hates is petrified.” And in the current era, when streaming has disrupted the economy of the media sector, Paramount Skydance can see as a more reliable bet than the linear viewers of “60 minutes”.

“The bottom line is that there is a feeling that the regulation process does not come as it should,” says Sundarum. “And the Trump right case is a huge key.”

The lawyers of Paramount and Trump are supposed to have entered into mediation, a process that will shed a shadow on Redstone’s term of office that supervises Paramount, which she took over from her father, Sumner Redstone. Shari Redstone insisted on a new combination of the CBS assets and those who were part of the company once known as Viacom, once housed in two separate companies. But the portfolio, which also includes the Showtime Pay-Cable Outlet, MTV, Nickelodeon and the Paramount Movie Studio, has been considered by a large passage of cable characteristics that have been thinned from investments over the years, and is not on its own for digital giants such as Netflix, Apple and Amazon. Redstone may have done better if they sold pieces instead of putting them all together.

Her apparent willingness to arrange the “60 minutes” appointment has also had other consequences. Last week Bill Owens, only the third executive producer in the almost six decades of the show, stopped abruptly, and said that he no longer had the freedom to lead the news magazine in the best interest of his journalism and his viewers. On Sunday, correspondent Scott Pelley took the rare step to detail this off-camera drama for viewers, and told them that Paramount had begun to consider what employees considered an unnecessary amount of influence on the editorial processes of “60 minutes”.

What is clear is the following: There are no “60 minutes” segments. But Paramount did installed, partly at Redstone’s assignment, a new layer of checks and balances in the form of a team led by Susan Zirinsky, the former CBS newspresident. Zirinsky had the task of monitoring all the work of CBS News, especially after reports on “60 minutes” and “CBS -Lochtenden” bound to attitudes around the conflict in Gaza encouraged criticism from lawyers.

Redstone had conversations with various Paramount managers, including George Cheeks, the Paramount Co CEO that supervises the CBS activities, on certain “60 minutes” stories, according to a person who is familiar with the issue. Redstone asked if stories that Trump could irritate were correct and balanced and asked if multiple stories that Trump’s anger should be able to run on the same night, says this person. Two other people who are familiar with the editorial process of “60 minutes” say that Zirinsky and her team were specific task to investigate stories associated with the middle East and politics.

Redstone has never spent edicts about stories linked to the Trump policy, says the person who is familiar with the situation and notices that the show has carried out such reports throughout the season. At this point the person adds, with the current TV season that is coming to an end, there is no reason to postpone stories that the show has in the pipeline, because every acquisition by Skydance will probably not be completed in that time frame.

Representatives for Paramount Global and Redstone refused to comment on this story.

This is perhaps the stuff of Aaron Sorkin TV series such as “The Newsroom” or “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, in which the people in the heart of a legendary media have to fight the managers who run the platform that brings the content to millions. The current Skydance -Pact of Paramount and the Trump -Pak have forced Redstone in an impossible choice: on the one hand she risks the image of a respected journalistic outlet to demonstrate a settlement with Trump; On the other hand, if the deal is not done, the health of the company that supplies the show to its audience can be in danger.

At the end of ‘Godfather II’, Michael Corleone is being chased by the choices he has made and thinks back to a simpler time. Whether Redstone is tormented in the same way is something that only she knows. Regarding the present moment in the media sector, it is only becoming more complex.

– Todd Spangler has contributed to this story