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The president and chief executive officer of CBS News announced on Monday that she is stepping down, citing disagreements with the network’s parent company as it confronts a $20bn lawsuit from Donald Trump and a looming merger.
Wendy McMahon, who has helmed the company’s venerated news division since 2023, said in a memo obtained by several media outlets – and shared in full on social media – that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward”.
Tensions have been building over the past few months, a period McMahon described as “challenging”.
“It’s time for me to move on and for this organization to move forward with new leadership,” McMahon wrote in the memo.
In November, Trump filed a $20bn lawsuit against 60 Minutes, CBS News’s flagship program, over an election season interview with his 2024 Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, which he claimed was deceptively edited. Legal experts have called the lawsuit baseless and argued that CBS would almost certainly prevail. But Paramount is reportedly in talks to settle with Trump, as it pursues a merger with Skydance Media, a deal that would require federal approval.
In April, Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, announced his resignation, saying he felt the newsmagazine had lost its journalistic independence.
McMahon reportedly stood by Owens, who said in the departing memo shared widely on social media: “Having defended this show – and what we stand for – from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward.”
Underscoring the building tensions in the newsroom, the 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley addressed Owens’s departure and delivered an extraordinary on-air rebuke of Paramount.
“Paramount began to supervise our content in new ways,” he told viewers. “None of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires.”
The network has maintained Trump’s lawsuit is without merit but is nevertheless seeking to settle as Paramount pursues the merger with Skydance. If it goes through, the Skydance deal would include a $2.4bn payout for the family holding of Paramount Global’s chair, Shari Redstone, Bloomberg News reported.
Many are worried that Paramount’s settling Trump’s lawsuit would continue a trend since the beginning of his second presidency in which companies and a university have surrendered to his demands to avoid punishments such as losing federal funding or access to federal buildings.
Notably, law firms agreed to perform $940m in pro bono work for the Trump administration and to not consider race in hiring, among other concessions.
ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos separately agreed to give $15m to a foundation and museum to be established by Trump to settle a lawsuit over an interview in which the host said a jury had found the president “liable for rape”, when in fact Trump had been found liable of sexual assault.
