Jon Stewart didn’t disappoint with his views on the multi-million-dollar settlement between Paramount Global, which owns The Daily Show network Comedy Central, and President Donald Trump.
Five days after the company paid Trump $16M to settle the lawsuit that the President brought against it for its handling of a 60 Minutes interview with Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Stewart called it “shameful” before throwing to a slide throwing Arbys under the bus as well. “For when you want a sandwich commensurate with your company’s shame,” it read.
After a few other lines during the first half of the show, which largely covered Trump’s recent “legislative coup”, Stewart doubled down and brought on former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft as his guest to discuss the topic.
Kroft, who won three Peabody Awards and nine Emmys for his reporting, spent 30 seasons on the show, leaving in 2019.
After introducing Kroft, Stewart called the settlement “unusual” before the journalist noted that a couple of Congressmen think it was “bribery”.
Kroft agreed that the move was “devastating” to the journalists at 60 Minutes and said there was a lot of “fear over there” about losing their jobs, what’s happening to the country and of losing the First Amendment.
After showing an interview with Trump on Fox News, Stewart said, “I would like to know why the 60 Minutes edit was worthy of a $16M acquiescence of what is considered the Tiffany news, gold standard network for Paramount of news, where, very clearly, Fox just did what seems to me to be a more egregious edit. So, explain to me what was going through the mind of Paramount when they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we screwed up, here’s your money’. Why didn’t they fight it?”
“They never said ‘We screwed up’. They just paid the money,” replied Kroft.
“Flat out protection money?,” asked Stewart. “Yeah, it was a shakedown,” he answered.
“Is this purely Paramount buying their way… they’re being sold right now, to a gentleman who was friends with the President, Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison at Skydance. Was this settlement just a payment so that this merger can go through and not be challenged by Trump’s FCC?,” asked Stewart?
“Yes,” replied Kroft. “It’s a little complicated. There’s Shari Redstone, who is the head of Paramount… she wants to sell it… so she wanted the sale to go through, but Donald Trump thought, I’m going to settle the score here. He’s said very often about ‘I’m going to go after my enemies’. He was upset [with] 60 Minutes, and he decided that that he was going to sue.”
