David Remnick: One of the hottest tickets on Broadway these days, in fact, it just broke a box office record, is the play Good Night and Good Luck. It's adapted from George Clooney's 2005 film. Clooney is on stage as Edward R. Murrow, the CBS News anchor. Murrow was the most respected journalist in his time, and the play dramatizes his stand against the lies and corruption of one of the most powerful men in America in mid-century, Senator Joseph McCarthy. It's an inspirational story, especially at a moment when Donald Trump, someone far more powerful than McCarthy ever was, is using lawsuits and raw intimidation to bring the media to heel. Donald Trump sued CBS eventually for $20 billion over 60 Minutes's interview with Kamala Harris. By all legal accounts, it's a preposterous suit, and yet Shari Redstone, the head of Paramount Global, which is CBS's parent company, is actively trying to negotiate a settlement. The reason is that she wants to sell her company, Paramount, and to do so, she needs government approval.

Redstone's critics and people at 60 Minutes contend that settling the lawsuit is, in effect, a surrender, a big payoff to the President. Yet Redstone has already made an offer to settle of $15 million. Trump, however, says that's not enough and he wants an apology. This is a very perilous time at CBS. I sat down last week to talk with a veteran of the network, Lesley Stahl, who reports for its premier news show, 60 Minutes. She's been at CBS for over 50 years.

Lesley Stahl: Just think about something. Think about my pension.

[laughter]

David Remnick: It's going to be huge. It's going to be huge. As a young reporter, Lesley Stahl covered Watergate.

Lesley Stahl: I was brand new. I was an affirmative action hire in 1972, and they sent me to cover Watergate because nobody thought it was a story. The first arraignment of the burglars, it was Woodward and me.

David Remnick: Now, Lesley, obviously we're going to get to the present tense and the pressures on the press and CBS News in 60 Minutes, but create a context here. How aware were you back then about the ownership of CBS News, pressures that the President might put on the owners, pressures from advertisers? We don't exist in an ideal vacuum.

Lesley Stahl: No, no. We were owned by William Paley back then, and fairly early on, when most of the television networks and most newspapers weren't covering Watergate, it was the Woodward Bernstein story. Walter Cronkite, our anchorman, decided that it was a very important story, and so he did a very-- Walter did a very, very long piece, 14 minutes, which was more than half the broadcast.

Walter Cronkite: Five men, apparently caught in the act of burglarizing and bugging Democratic headquarters in Washington.

Lesley Stahl: Walter's voice carried a lot of weight. He was the most trusted man in America, and he was so that he did the story; they didn't farm it out to someone else. Also made the statement. William Paley, President of the United States, picked up or had his right-hand man pick up the phone, call him, scream at him. I don't know if you've ever had the White House scream at you. I have.

David Remnick: It's no fun.

Lesley Stahl: It's terrible and frightening. Paley succumbed. Walter ran the 14-minute piece. His plan was to come back the next night with another 14-minute piece, which was in the works. Paley's pressure was now so intense on the CBS News division, Walter was squeezed. He didn't pull the piece, but he did cut it in half. These things have happened before--

David Remnick: [crosstalk] Paley was no hero in this?

Lesley Stahl: Paley was a hero during the McCarthy time-

David Remnick: Because he stood up--

Lesley Stahl: - but not during the Watergate time.

David Remnick: Now, you've interviewed Donald Trump a number of times.

Lesley Stahl: Four times.

David Remnick: When was the first time? How far do you go back?

Lesley Stahl: Oh, the first time was when he became the nominee right before his convention.

David Remnick: First time. '16.

Lesley Stahl: Yes.

David Remnick: What was that like?

Lesley Stahl: He and Pence were sitting together side by side.

David Remnick: Mike Pence is vice presidential nominee.

Lesley Stahl: Correct. What was amusing was I was focused on their faces, but I didn't see anything below their shoulders in my line of vision. We had a wide shot, and in the edit room, we could see all three cameras going at the same time. Only then did I see Mr. Trump directing him with his hand, telling him when to be quiet, telling him when to talk. I thought that was--

[laughter]

David Remnick: That first interview was, by the standard of Trump interviews, reasonably civil.

Lesley Stahl: All my interviews were civil, even the last one.

David Remnick: Well, but in 2020, it got hot. [chuckles]

Lesley Stahl: It didn't get hot.

David Remnick: He walked out on you.

Lesley Stahl: Yes, but he didn't storm out on me.

David Remnick: Oh, that's what counts as civil, is walking out on you, but not storming out. He said at one point, "I wish you would interview Joe Biden like you interview me." He wasn't happy with you. You know he's in the middle of a scandal. He was referring to Hunter Biden. Then you said, "He's not." There was a back and forth, and you said, "This is 60 Minutes, and we can't put on things that we cannot verify." He didn't like this.

Lesley Stahl: There was an interesting sequence. He said at the end, "You have enough. He wasn't doing that well." He got up, he was calm and quiet, and I said, "Watch the wires." He said, "I'll see you later." He had agreed to do a walk after the interview outside. He said, "I'll see you for the walk."

David Remnick: Like B roll in--

Lesley Stahl: Yes, exactly. It's called a 60 Minutes walk.

David Remnick: I like it.

Lesley Stahl: It was after he thought about it that he got angry and canceled the walk.

David Remnick: Lesley, afterwards, he went on Facebook and he accused you and CBS of bias, hatred, and rudeness.

Lesley Stahl: Afterward. He got angry afterward.

David Remnick: Why?

Lesley Stahl: I don't know.

David Remnick: In one of your encounters with Donald Trump, maybe it was off camera, he described to you how he behaves with the press in a very almost rational way. Can you tell me about that?

Lesley Stahl: He'd been hammering away at us, meaning the press in general, at every rally. His rallies were getting larger and larger, and it was becoming very clear that he was going to be the nominee. I said, "You attack the press every time you speak. You use pretty much the same language. It's kind of getting boring. Why do you do this? Why do you keep at it?" He said, "I do it so that when you write or say negative things about me, no one will believe you."

It sent a chill through me because I thought, "Wow, he has thought this through." This isn't something that's a casual angry that the press said something yesterday about me. It was thought out. It was a strategy. It was something that clearly he'd worked through. It was the first time, frankly, that I appreciated that he had a real serious agenda.

David Remnick: It became more sophisticated because now what he does is he pursues and sues institutions of the press. What he's discovering is those institutions buckle. He went after the Washington Post, and Jeff Bezos has buckled. He's gone after ABC after George Stephanopoulos described the sexual assault case in language that Donald Trump didn't like, even though the judge used the same language. ABC settled because Disney has other business to do. Did you imagine that he would come after you this hard and with this kind of ammunition?

Lesley Stahl: No.

David Remnick: Did you feel vulnerable? Did CBS feel vulnerable?

Lesley Stahl: 60 Minutes. I would say that we definitely feel under attack.

[music]

David Remnick: I'm talking with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, and we'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. [silence]

[music]

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Lesley Stahl. Lesley Stahl was the first woman to serve as White House correspondent for CBS. She was the moderator for the Sunday show Face the Nation, and since 1991, she's reported for 60 Minutes. We've been talking about the Trump administration's attempt to intimidate CBS and many other news outlets as well. CBS's parent company, Paramount, is attempting to settle a lawsuit from Donald Trump. The head of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, as well as the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, both resigned recently. I spoke with Lesley Stahl last week, just days before Paramount offered a settlement to Donald Trump of $15 million, a settlement that he did not accept. The negotiations are ongoing. Now, during the latter days of the campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, 60 Minutes, as I understand it, wanted to interview both of them.

Lesley Stahl: Correct.

David Remnick: Donald Trump refused.

Lesley Stahl: Well, first he accepted, and then he changed his mind.

David Remnick: What happened?

Lesley Stahl: We don't know. He said yes, and then he said no.

David Remnick: There was an interview with Kamala Harris, and what happened?

Lesley Stahl: It wasn't my story, so it's hard for me to talk exactly about how the sequence went. We start putting out snippets of our interviews on Thursday, so that's what we did. We gave Face the Nation a clip. Now, Bill Whitaker asked a question. I'm not sure what it was.

David Remnick: Bill Whitaker, who did the interview-

Lesley Stahl: Who did the interview--

David Remnick: -with Kamala Harris? Yes.

Lesley Stahl: Yes. There was a very long answer. 60 Minutes ran one part of the answer in Bill's piece, and Face the Nation chose another part of the same answer to run on theirs. Now, we are under time constraints, and this was done for time. We had it to keep our pieces down to a certain length. This is what Mr. Trump sued over.

David Remnick: Well, what he said was, is that you reduced the-- [chuckles] you made clear what was word salad. In other words, what he was accusing 60 Minutes of doing is trying to make Kamala Harris look better.

Lesley Stahl: That isn't what we did. We just ran two different halves of the same answer.

David Remnick: What's behind the lawsuit, in your estimation? By the way, the lawsuit is for $20 billion.

Lesley Stahl: $20 billion. I think what is really behind it, in a nutshell, is to chill us. There aren't any damages. He accused us of editing Kamala Harris in a way to help her win the election, but he won the election.

David Remnick: Why isn't this a frivolous lawsuit?

Lesley Stahl: It is a frivolous lawsuit.

David Remnick: Why isn't CBS treating it as a frivolous lawsuit? As I understand it, Lesley, they're in negotiations to settle this lawsuit. That's where the trouble begins. If I can give the background for those who are not following it, it's against a corporate background. CBS is owned by Paramount. Paramount, run by Shari Redstone, wants to make a deal with something called Skydance, run by the Ellison family, and in a sense, sell itself to Skydance. It's an enormous deal worth billions and billions of dollars. Larry Ellison, by the way, is very pro-Trump.

Shari Redstone wants to unload you, wants to unload CBS and Paramount, and be done with it, make a lot of money and walk away, but she sees trouble because she has to get FCC approval for this deal, and she's worried that the FCC might stand in the way of this deal because it's under Donald Trump and she's willing to compromise. I have to think that the newsroom at 60 Minutes must have been in incredible turmoil and be that way to this day.

Lesley Stahl: Turmoil is too strong a word. We've put our--

David Remnick: Is it?

Lesley Stahl: I think so. Turmoil suggests that the ship was so unsteady, we weren't functioning, but that is not true. We just kept doing our jobs the same way.

David Remnick: Why did Bill Owens step down?

Lesley Stahl: Because he was being asked to either not run pieces or to change parts of the stories. He was standing up to that. I don't know, frankly, if there was one request that led to it or just accumulation, one after the next after the next.

David Remnick: Describe the day that Bill Owens came in front of the staff and stepped down.

Lesley Stahl: That was just painful, painful. Everybody at 60 Minutes, I think, everybody, most of us really appreciated his standing up to the pressure and saw him in heroic terms. When he announced that he was stepping down, it was a punch in the stomach. It was one of those punches where you almost can't breathe.

David Remnick: Then the head of CBS News did the same thing. Wendy McMahon stepped down.

Lesley Stahl: Yes. She was the intermediary between us and the corporation, and she sided with us, with CBS News. When she stepped down, that was another blow because she was another barrier. I use that word, barrier.

David Remnick: I have to say, Lesley and I, with no relish at all, God knows, it looks pretty obvious at this point that they're going to settle that lawsuit just as ABC did, so that they can be sold to Skydance.

Lesley Stahl: Yes.

David Remnick: Are you angry at Shari Redstone?

Lesley Stahl: Yes, I think I am. I think I am.

David Remnick: What would drive you out? What is your limit? Where do you say I, Lesley Stahl, who've been at this network for so long and have given so much to it, I cannot go this far?

Lesley Stahl: I haven't in my own mind drawn that line, because there are many different lines. Bill Owens' leaving was a line, and here we all are. He asked us not to resign. He explicitly asked us not to resign because it was discussed that we would leave it en masse.

David Remnick: Shari Redstone has also made it known that she had problems with the coverage of the Israel-Palestine war and conflict. How did she make that known? What message does that send to you as a reporter?

Lesley Stahl: The message came down through the line through Wendy McMahon to Bill.

David Remnick: This is hard.

Lesley Stahl: Yes, it is hard. It's big. It's not a small thing.

David Remnick: Tell me about that.

Lesley Stahl: To have a news organization come under corporate pressure, to have a news organization told by a corporation do this, do that with your story, change this, change that, don't run that piece. It steps on the First Amendment. It steps on the freedom of the press. It makes me question whether any corporation should own a news operation. It is very disconcerting. As I said, we have had pressure before in earlier owners.

David Remnick: Was it ever like this?

Lesley Stahl: I can't remember a lawsuit.

David Remnick: Let's assume this deal goes through. Skydance buys you. There might be other permutations, too. You might end up joined to the hip with CNN and a deal with Warner, who knows? Let's assume it's a simple sale, and suddenly CBS News and 60 Minutes is under Skydance, which is run by Larry Ellison's family. Would you expect 60 Minutes to change quite radically?

Lesley Stahl: Why would we?

David Remnick: Because your corporate overlord has told you you have to.

Lesley Stahl: We haven't. We've had a corporate overlord, to use your word, who has told us to change.

David Remnick: You quietly have resisted the editorial pressures from Shari Redstone?

Lesley Stahl: Correct. I'm just frankly, and this is being a little Pollyanna. Pollyanna-ish. That's that word that David Ellison and the people he brings in to run his organization hold the freedom of the press up as a beacon, that they understand the importance of allowing us to be independent and do our jobs. I'm expecting that. I'm hoping that. I want that. I'm praying for that. I have no reason to think that won't happen.

David Remnick: That would be the best outcome.

Lesley Stahl: That would be the best outcome, and why would I--

David Remnick: Is there a lot of optimism at 60 Minutes that that will be the outcome?

Lesley Stahl: No, but there's also not a lot of dark thinking either. Perhaps. Let me talk about me. I am perhaps being blind, maybe I should understand what's coming. I'm not operating that way. I'm not optimistic. I am not. I'm pessimistic. I'm pessimistic about the future for all press today. The public doesn't trust us. The public has lost faith in us as an institution, so we're in very dark times.

David Remnick: How do you analyze that, the lack of trust?

Lesley Stahl: I will tell you how I analyze that. We used to have the Fairness Doctrine, and people saw that we were very visibly presenting two sides in our stories. We lost that. We then got-- I don't know what the word is-- advocacy journalism came along. Fox News was probably the beginning of it, but now we have MSNBC, and those outlets wear their ideology on their sleeves. Everybody knows that Fox News is right. Everybody knows that MSNBC is left. Nobody's making any bones about it. Here's the problem. They're called media. They're media. I'm called media. The New York Times is called media. No wonder the public think we're all political. We're all in the salad bowl together. It's been--

David Remnick: How do you resolve that, Lesley?

Lesley Stahl: We haven't been able to, and it's been a problem for a long time. It's not a problem that's propped up because Donald Trump is president. We've been having this issue of being tarred with that brush for as long as Fox has been around. I don't know how to explain that we're different. Maybe even if the public did understand that we're different, they wouldn't have faith in us. That is a distressing thought to me.

David Remnick: One of the problems you have now, I would say, is that independent of your politics, you've got half the country who acknowledges that Donald Trump is carrying out corrupt practices, meme coins, all kinds of things that are unprecedented in their scale of corruption, and just in general, is pushing a much more authoritarian view of American political life. Now, is that ideology or is that factual reporting? Even Bob Woodward.

Lesley Stahl: This is a very good question.

David Remnick: Even Bob Woodward will say this.

Lesley Stahl: I resist saying it.

David Remnick: You do?

Lesley Stahl: I do.

David Remnick: As a matter of professional practice or a matter of opinion?

Lesley Stahl: As a matter of professional practice.

David Remnick: Let me close with this. What concerns me finally in our conversation is the fragility of these institutions, the fragility of them that we thought would last forever. A friend of mine pointed out, David Halberstam wrote a book in 1979 called The Powers That Be, about the biggest institutions in the press in this country besides the New York Times. Those institutions were the Los Angeles Times, which is now in a terrible state. Time magazine, which has practically disappeared or is in the process of it, I'm afraid. The Washington Post, which is going through its own drama with Jeff Bezos and CBS News.

Lesley Stahl: You had a good word there, in my opinion. Fragility. Here's the pain in my heart. The pain in my heart is that the public does not appreciate the importance of a free and strong, and tough press in our democracy. That we have a function to fulfill, and that the public doesn't seem to want what we do to be part of our public life.

David Remnick: The dilemma is that most of these places that I named, the New York Times is an exception. For most of these owners, the organ of the press that they own is small change compared to Disney under ABC, Amazon, which owns the Washington Post, and so on and so forth, so that it can be easily compromised.

Lesley Stahl: We're a headache. We are headache.

David Remnick: An expensive headache.

Lesley Stahl: An expensive headache. That's part of the fragility. I think the more important part is public attitude. It hurts more than you can imagine, more than everything that's going on with us in our business, and yes.

David Remnick: Lesley, you are the age, and you're a phenomenon.

Lesley Stahl: I am the age I am. [laughs] I am the age I am. [laughs]

David Remnick: You show no signs of losing interest in this activity. I get the sense that it would break your heart if this institution, 60 Minutes, really-

Lesley Stahl: Oh, yes.

David Remnick: -either fell apart or became a shell of itself.

Lesley Stahl: No question. No question. I'm already beginning to think about mourning, grieving, but I'm holding out hope. I know there's going to be a settlement. I know there's going to be some money exchanged. I know that. Then we will hopefully still be around, turning a new page and finding out what that new page is going to look like.

David Remnick: You wouldn't walk away?

Lesley Stahl: Depends. You asked me where my line is. I'm not sure. I don't think I can express what it is, but there is a line. Of course, there's a line.

David Remnick: Lesley Stahl, thank you.

Lesley Stahl: Okay. Thank you.

David Remnick: Lesley Stahl reports for 60 Minutes. We should note that a CBS spokesperson denies that Paramount or CBS management has ever blocked stories on 60 Minutes.

 

Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.