Bill O’Reilly said what basically everyone has been thinking since CBS parent company Paramount agreed to a $16 million settlement over the Kamala Harris interview on “60 Minutes” last week: The company would have won in court – but needs Trump to approve its complex sale to Skydance.
“So the settlement, uh, from CBS is interesting,” the “No Spin News” host said Monday. “Trump [was] never going to approve that unless CBS capitulated — which they did. … But the bigger picture is what’s important.”
The July 1 settlement includes “plaintiffs’ fees and costs” as well as a donation to a future presidential library; Trump will not personally receive any money. Paramount also said that “in the future, 60 Minutes will release transcripts of interviews with eligible U.S. presidential candidates after such interviews have aired.”
“This is all about ’60 Minutes,’” the former CBS employee and Fox News host said. “[They] wanted Kamala Harris to win the election. There’s no doubt about it. You just go back and look at the transcripts as I have, and it’s all about promoting Kamala and diminishing Trump.”
Trump claimed CBS interfered with the election and damaged his own companies when it aired a promo that was different from an answer Harris gave to correspondent Bill Whitaker. While O’Reilly believes Trump had a point, he didn’t think the president would have won.
“I don’t think that CBS would have lost that case in court,” O’Reilly said. “There is a difference, but is it egregious? So Trump sued them for billions of dollars.”
O’Reilly said he knows the corporate media has gone far left – “I know … I don’t think that, it’s not an opinion” – and played a clip from the October 8, 2024 interview to prove his point.
“Whitaker should have gone bang — ‘Give me one solution you’ve offered in the first year of the Biden administration.’ Give me one’ … Because she always falls back on, ‘Oh, Trump killed the immigration bill that Charles Schumer ginned up early this year.’ … [Whitaker] booted it because he didn’t anticipate the boldness of the lie — that what she just said, ‘From day one, literally, we have been offering solutions,’ is about the biggest falsehood I have heard from any politician in the last decade.”
O’Reilly said Trump proved as much when he shut down the border and “stopped the illegal immigration asylum madness in two months.”
“Whitaker was soft on her,” O’Reilly added. “This is not an interview. It’s not the way it’s done. You’ve been watching me for almost 30 years. You know how an interview on television should be done. This is gibberish.”
Paramount Global has agreed to merge with Skydance Media in a complex $8 billion deal. If approved, the deal is expected to close by fall 2025.
