David Ellison made one thing abundantly clear on his first official day as the owner of the new Paramount – he did not want to get into whether a side deal was reached as part of the pre-merger $16 million lawsuit settlement paid to Donald Trump.
After a grueling and politically tainted 13-month process, Skydance Media’s $8.4 billion merger with Paramount Global officially closed Thursday. Weeks before Trump’s Federal Communications Commission finally approved the deal, however, Paramount – then led by Shari Redstone – agreed to settle with the president in his “meritless” complaint about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.
Settling with Trump, which has long been a fraught topic in CBS hallways and sparked the resignations of several news leaders, prompted accusations of “bribery” from lawmakers and free press advocates. Those allegations only grew louder after the president boasted just before the merger was approved that he had reached a separate agreement with Ellison to air up to $20 million of pro-Trump advertisements on CBS programming once Skydance took over.
While the previous leadership of Paramount denied any knowledge of a secret handshake deal, Ellison – whose dad is pro-Trump Oracle founder Larry Ellison – had remained mum on the matter. However, with Thursday marking his first day as head of the newly minted Paramount Skydance, Ellison found himself pressed repeatedly on the issue at a press event heralding the merger.
Having spent his morning making a symbolic first stop at the CBS News offices, where he “said all the right things” while assuring the staff of his commitment to the news division, Ellison and his senior leadership team held a Q&A session at the company’s headquarters in Times Square. While he was there to put forward his vision for the new Paramount’s future, a number of media reporters were more interested in the recent past.
“We were not involved in the settlement in any way,” Ellison said when asked about the Trump payoff, adding that “we complied with all laws including anti-bribery laws.”
He then cited a recent letter sent to Democratic senators who inquired about the side deal and Paramount’s cancellation of the longtime CBS late-night show hosted by Trump critic Stephen Colbert, which occurred just days before the administration approved the merger.
That letter, which was from Skydance’s general counsel, said the company was “not involved” in the Colbert decision but didn’t directly address the “side deal” question. “Skydance was neither a party to the lawsuit nor to Paramount’s settlement of its litigation with the President,” the Skydance lawyer wrote.
“We’re focused on the future… We are not going to politicize anything today,” Ellison responded when asked another time about the president’s claims about free advertising. “We want to entertain first.”
Ellison would continue to double down on that message, specifically when asked about FCC chair Brendan Carr saying that Skydance had promised to “root out the bias that has undermined the trust in national news media” once it took over Paramount.
“I do not want to politicize our company in any way shape or form, we want to obviously speak to the biggest audience possible,” he declared when pressed about any examples of bias he would intend to fix.
Shortly before the merger’s approval, Skydance told the FCC that it would hire an ombudsman to address “complaints of bias” at CBS News once it took over Paramount. Asked whether he was concerned that the FCC could take action based on the ombudsman’s findings, Ellison shrugged it off.
“I don’t think it’ll get to that,” he said. “We want to be a path-based and truth-based news organization. That’s what we’re about. That’s the legacy of CBS.”
With Ellison also declining to answer questions about reports that he’s in talks with Bari Weiss to possibly purchase her anti-woke outlet, The Free Press ,and install her in a senior role at CBS News, saying he doesn’t want to address rumors, he continued down the same path time and time again.
“We’re ready to move past the noise,” he proclaimed.
