The Daily - A Dark Moment for Journalism — and Devastation in Texas

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

Last week, when Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, announced a $16 million settlement with President Trump over editing of a segment of “60 Minutes,” many of the network’s journalists were furious.The deal also raised questions about the independence of CBS’s journalism, and how much news organizations could be cowed by threats from the president going forward.David Enrich, an investigations editor at The Times, takes us inside the settlement, and Lowell Bergman, a former CBS producer and investigative journalist at The Times, reminds us that the network has been in a similar situation before and discusses why this time may be different.First, Edgar Sandoval, who is on the ground in Texas, explains what is happening in the wake of the flooding.Guest:Edgar Sandoval, a reporter for The New York Times covering Texas.David Enrich, a deputy investigations editor for The New York Times.Lowell Bergman, a journalist and former producer for CBS’s “60 Minutes.”Background reading: Paramount to pay Donald Trump $16 million to settle ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit.For ‘60 Minutes,’ a humbling moment at an uneasy time for press freedom.More than 50 have been found dead in Texas floods as the search for missing grows dire.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Hey everybody, it's Rachel. Before we begin today's show, we wanted to bring you the latest from central Texas. In Texas tonight, a catastrophic flood emergency. Months worth of torrential rain fell in just a few hours in Kerr County. Where flash flooding has killed at least 80 people as of Sunday afternoon, dozens are still missing. The desperate search for the missing after deadly flash floods in Texas has become a race against time. Among those missing,

a number of youth camps dot the area, including Camp Mystic. are 10 girls from a summer camp along the Guadalupe River. We will remain 100% dedicated, searching for every single one of the children who were at Camp Mystic, as well as anybody else in the entire riverbed, to make sure that they're going to be recovered. I called our colleague Edgar Sandoval, who's on the ground there, to help us understand what happened. So Edgar, it's four o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Can you just tell us where are you and what is the scene like there? Right now I'm in Kerrville, Texas.

I came here as soon as I heard that the floods have devastated the parts of the community. And the scene was just out of a war zone. You could see just hours later after the rain started that it had taken entire neighborhoods, entire houses were gone. There were smashed trees everywhere. The roads were just broken in many parts. And my first stop was at a shelter in Curbill. And the first man I saw was a man by the name of Brian Eaves.

He was wrapping a blanket and trying to light up a cigarette. He started to recount to me the ordeal that he went through just a few hours earlier. Do you live alone there? No, I was with my wife. I have no idea if she's... He told me that him and his wife were sleeping in an RV park near the Guadalupe River. And then I looked outside and seen how bad it was so I woke up my wife for us to get out. They felt these raging waters just coming seemingly out of nowhere. We got out of the RV trying to make it to my truck. We got swept away, made it to another truck. Oh wow. They got into a neighbor's truck, the three of them. They were trying to drive away. We went about 20 feet and this truck died and then we just got swept away. The water really overwhelmed that truck as well. I came up. You're doing your wife? Yeah, me and my wife. She got ripped out of my arms.

And I came up and I heard her and she wasn't that far away from me. So I tried to swim to her. And then I got hit in the back of the head and got taken down by more debris. Oh my god. Did a couple of tumbles underwater. I came up and I couldn't hear her no more. And I finally ran into a tree and I wrapped myself around the tree. He swam to shore and he was just hoping that she grew up into a tree or some sort of large debris or a piece of refrigerator.

So I have no idea what happened to my wife. And hours later he was just desperately looking for her. But sadly, later on Friday morning, he was told that she did not make it and had passed away. and make it and had passed away. That is a really awful story, and I cannot even imagine how devastated that must be for him and for the community. I think one question on everybody's minds right now is, how did an overnight rainstorm

kill so many people so quickly? I mean, that's the question everyone is asking. This area is called Flash Flood Valley, but the water really came out of nowhere. And in the span of a few hours, from four in the morning to about six in the morning, they got the amount of water they would see in months. So people didn't really have time to get out. Can you talk a little bit more about the kind of warnings that went out before these floods began?

Like, why does it seem like they did not come in time? Well, I spoke to many residents who began receiving the warnings, like around four or five in the morning. And a lot of them tell me that, at first they didn't really make much of them, and they only started living in their homes and their RV trucks when the water reached their floors.

And that's when they had to escape and, you know, save their lives. I think there's going to be a lot of debate in the coming days about who knew what when, what could have been done differently? Could people have been warned and evacuated faster? I know we don't have a lot of answers to those questions now, but just as a reporter on the ground there, seeing what you're seeing, talking to everybody,

what has struck you about what you've witnessed and this particular tragedy? I live not far from here and I've never seen anything like this. I grew up along the border, which is also known for a fair share of flash warnings and floods, but this is just beyond what anyone has experienced in their lifetimes here.

I think the authorities are not really trying to answer that question as well. Every time they're pressed on it, they keep telling us, the media, to just focus on who's hurting right now and finding the survivors, and they gonna quote unquote deal with this later but I think that's a question everyone is desperately trying to answer at the same time as they try to find their loved ones. Edgar thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Okay, here's today's show. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams and this is The Daily. Last week, when Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, announced a $16 million settlement to President Trump, many of the network's journalists were furious. The deal also raised questions about the independence of CBS's journalism, and how much news organizations

could be cowed by threats from the president going forward. Today, my colleague David Enrich takes us inside the settlement, and former CBS producer Lowell Bergman reminds us that CBS has been in this situation before and explains why he thinks that this time is different. It's Monday, July 7th. You ready for us? I'm going to spit up my gum. You came in here with gum? I almost came in here with martinis. Okay.

Well, thank you for your time for us, since you are on deadline and still reporting this out. David, let's start off with you just explaining to us what this lawsuit is about. Well, the lawsuit is about an allegation by Trump that CBS, when it aired an interview with Kamala Harris last October, deceptively edited it in a way that was designed to make Kamala Harris sound a lot better than she really did. Harris had a reputation on the campaign trail for not being always the most concise or articulate public speaker.

Okay. not being always the most concise or articulate public speaker. And... For a special election edition of 60 Minutes that will air Monday, our Bill Whitaker sat down with Vice President Harris and asked... CBS recorded this interview for 60 Minutes, but they teased the interview a day earlier on another program. Does the U.S. have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu? The aid that we have given Israel allowed Israel to defend itself against 200 ballistic missiles that were just meant to attack the Israelis and the people of Israel. And on that other program, Face the Nation, the answer that Harris gave was different

than what CBS on 60 Minutes the following evening showed. Does the U.S. have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu? The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles. But it seems that... It was shorter and just slightly different. And it was edited the way things on radio and TV are usually edited, to not bore viewers to death by giving a whole long answer to something.

You know, we now know, you can look back at the transcript, and you can see that they basically took the first half or first two thirds of her answer, used that on Face the Nation, and then 24 hours later used the final third of it on 60 Minutes. And... 60 Minutes was just caught editing Kamala Harris's interview to make her answers look better. It immediately led to a bunch of conspiracy theories on social media on the right. What they did was put out this version with the words said about Israel first, sought a negative reaction and say, you know what, on TV that's not going to do good. So let's just change

the answer altogether. That CBS was kind of hiding what Kamala Harris had actually said or trying to clean up her words to make her sound better. And it was a conspiracy theory that Trump and his allies really deliberately fed. What they did with her, I believe, is the biggest scandal in broadcast history. I do. And, you know, it culminated four days before the election with this lawsuit. It's frankly a pretty tortured legal argument that he's making. The lawsuit was filed in Texas and he is claiming that viewers of 60 Minutes in

Texas who watched this basically walked away with the impression that Harris sounded a lot more articulate than she did and that that persuaded an untold number of Texas voters. A state he won. A state he won handily. Mm-hmm. That they nonetheless voted for Harris instead of Trump as a result of this allegedly doctored interview.

That's a kind of a tenuous argument. There's no evidence to support it actually being true. Okay, so basically you're saying this is like a very weak case in other words. Yeah, and I've been focusing on these types of lawsuits for a couple of years now in my job and this is one of the weakest I think that I have seen. Okay, so Trump follows the lawsuit right before the election. The idea was that if Harris ended up winning, then 60 Minutes would have intentionally helped her to do so,

to the detriment of candidate Trump. But obviously, that did not happen because he won. So, I don't understand, how is he still claiming that he's somehow hurt by this? And Trump's goal here was broader. Since the moment he started campaigning for president in 2015, a central part of his schtick has been bashing the media, sowing distrust in the media, and he viewed this lawsuit and his allies viewed this lawsuit as a really powerful weapon to keep beating

the media with and to beat CBS over the head with. And also, I think, is designed to a certain extent to send a message to not just CBS, but the mainstream media in general, that Trump is not going to just stand by and get criticized in the media. He is going going to just stand by and get criticized in the media. He is going to fight back as aggressively as he can. And so instead of walking away from the lawsuit, as you might have expected, he not only continued pursuing the lawsuit, but he expanded it.

He no longer was asking for $10 billion in damages. He doubled that to $20 billion. He added more plaintiffs. They were really going full steam on this. So the idea here is that it's a super weak case that he's pursuing not because he might actually win any monetary damages But for all these other reasons you just articulated. Yeah, and there's one other that I haven't articulated Which is that the moment he won the election? I think he sensed that he had an added sorts of leverage against CBS in particular

Which was that CBS is parent company Paramount? of leverage against CBS in particular, which was that CBS's parent company, Paramount, which is controlled by Sherry Redstone, was in the process of trying to merge with another company, Skydance. And these two huge entertainment companies, they needed the federal government's approval to complete their merger. And Trump was about to take over the federal government. And so he and his administration, in theory, would have the power to either approve or reject that merger. And it was going to be very much in the interests of CBS's parent

company to have a relationship with Trump that was sufficiently positive that that would not stand in the way of this multibillion dollar merger going through. So basically, he feels like there's going to be another reason for them to capitulate, which seems like they did. That's exactly right.

And that is ultimately what happened. Trump's instincts, I think, were right. Paramount comes to the negotiating table and to, I think, the surprise and frustration of a lot of CBS employees, agrees to negotiate and now has agreed to pay $16 million to Trump, his lawyers, his future foundation. CBS has also agreed as part of the settlement to, in the future, when 60 Minutes interviews presidential candidates, they will release full unedited transcripts afterwards. Is that unusual?

CBS hasn't done it in the past, and I think that's a pretty easy concession for them to make, because it's clearly for the sake of transparency. The transparency thing makes sense to me, because it is spiritually aligned with the mission of a journalistic organization. But the overarching story here is one of CBS capitulating as part of a lawsuit that nobody thought had any merit. And so I'm curious what the reaction has been inside of CBS as all of this has been going on for the last few months. Saying they're upset would be a real understatement. Our sacred rule of law is under attack.

Journalism is under attack. The reaction has been really apoplectic. In tonight's last minute, a note on Bill Owens, who until this past week was executive producer of 60 Minutes. You've already seen some top journalists at 60 Minutes either leave, like Bill Owens did. Bill resigned Tuesday. It was hard on him and hard on us. But he did it for us and you. Or speak out against these settlement negotiations

like Scott Pelley and Leslie Stahl have. 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. I mean, it steps on the First Amendment. It steps on the freedom of the press. And one of the things that they are especially worried about is that this is going to set a precedent,

both internally at CBS, but for the broader news media in general. I'm not optimistic. I am not. I'm pessimistic. I'm pessimistic about the future for all press today. That there is a very clear playbook for people like Trump when they are unhappy with coverage or just want to cause trouble internally at these news organizations, that they can file

lawsuits that stand very little chance of succeeding in court and that their companies are going to rush to the negotiating table and agree to pay millions of dollars. And the next step, the logical next step, is that companies do not like paying millions of dollars in settlements. And so the kind of rational thing to do in that case is to stop writing things, publishing things, airing things, that are going to upset the president, because you

want to avoid getting these types of frivolous lawsuits being filed in the first place. And you talk to people at CBS right now, people who are there or have recently left, and they've already seen what they think are some signs that CBS is going to be less willing to take journalistic risks and go after the richest, most powerful people in institutions on the planet because they are worried about the legal blowback from this. Can you describe a few examples of the signs that they've seen? At 60 Minutes, there was a segment that was due to air on the IRS and the cuts that the Trump administration is making to the IRS.

That got postponed by months. Now CBS people say that that was a normal journalistic decision, and it may well have been, but that did not stop the concerns from being raised internally, that this was part of an effort to kind of appease the Trump administration. And certainly on the Trump side, and the people I talked to there interpreted it that way. They basically kind of thumped their chests when they heard about this and saw it as an indication that their pressure tactics were working and that by doing all this legal saber rattling, by filing this lawsuit, by driving a tough negotiating stance, that they could

strongly influence the appetite that a storied institution like CBS would have to pursue hard-hitting aggressive investigative journalism. Right. And even if you don't know for certain that a story is being killed, I imagine if you work at CBS, there's just a cloud hanging over you about why every decision is being made. I mean, even though... And wouldn't it be easier to just shy away from that really hard story or just dial it back a little bit if that will make it easier for your story to air? And it's that kind of infectious self-censorship that I think a lot of people

at CBS and in the broader news industry are really worried that it's that kind of infectious self-censorship that I think a lot of people at CBS and in the broader news industry are really worried is that it's going to take hold. And I think based on my reporting that that's exactly what Trump and his allies are hoping will happen. Well, we should mention though, at least, CBS is saying that, of course,

that this will not change their news standards. But what you are saying is that there are signs that that is just not true, or at least people within CBS have reason to be suspicious already. I think they have good reason to be suspicious. And look, I've been reporting on these types of legal threats and legal actions in the news industry across the US.

And it's the same pattern over and over again. Organizations reach settlements or deals, they back down. And the line that they say is that, you know, this is just about being able to move on. And I think it's not surprising to see why. It's because when you see how expensive it is to defend against these lawsuits, whether you're settling them or not,

the rational thing to do is to try to avoid situations where you're going to face intense legal blowback. -♪ MUSIC PLAYING. to try to avoid situations where you're going to face intense legal blowback. I have to note that all of what you just described sounds a lot like the plot of a movie. In fact, it is the plot of a movie. An insider ready to speak the truth. The movie is called The Insider. It came out in the 90s. A reporter who will help him reveal it.

And it is about Lowell Bergman, a journalist at CBS, 60 Minutes, who basically gets his story killed because of the interest of his corporate parent. It will pin you to your seat, the best film of the year. Have you seen this movie? I love that movie. And I agree. History sometimes repeats itself. And there are a lot of indications here that what CBS is doing right now to appease

Trump and get a deal done for its corporate parent is a repeat of what happened in The Insider with the tobacco coverage and Lowell Bergman's story decades earlier. What would you say if I told you that we were going to talk to Lowell Bergman in the second half of this episode? I would say tell him I'm a huge fan. David Enrich, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. After the break, Lowell Bergman.

We'll be right back. Lowell Bergman, it is such an honor to have you here. I'm actually just interviewing you to make Michael Barbaro jealous because he just referred to you as the greatest television news producer of all time. Send money. Well, hello. Welcome to the daily. Lowell, we are talking to you on the heels of this huge settlement that came down on Tuesday night for $16 million.

And before we get into the guts of it, I want to hear what was your reaction when you heard the Stoos? Well, I think we all expected a settlement. I suppose the question was the dollar amount. Paramount was going to do something to pay off Donald Trump in order to get the merger so Ms. Redstone could get her money. That seemed to be written in stone that something was going to happen like that. For 60 minutes, I think for those of us in journalism, it didn't matter how much money

it was, one way or another. I imagine this kind of capitulation from Paramount feels slightly familiar to you, at least thematically, because this gets why we really wanted to talk to you, which is that I recently watched The Insider at the suggestion of my colleague Michael Barbaro, because he said that this situation with CBS is exactly like The Insider, and I said, what's the insider and I watched it No Bergman B-E-R-G-M-A-N I'm a producer with 60 minutes and of course This is the film where Al Pacino plays you when you were a producer at CBS. Is it newsworthy? Yes Are we gonna air it?

Of course not. And I was so struck by some of the similarities. You won't be satisfied unless you're putting the company at risk. What are you? Are you a businessman or are you a newsman? And so I would like to ask you, could you tell me the story of what happened

when you were there at CBS? In my case, I was a producer at 60 Minutes for, at that time, about 12 years. How the medical establishment found out what AIDS was. And had enjoyed the backing of the company. ... what he calls drug trafficking by the CIA in partnership with the Venezuelan nation. And had done a number of stories all around the world. Seldom do Western reporters get a chance, as we did last week, to go behind the barricades that separate the rest of Beirut from a...

Some of them were honored with awards, but at the same time, it was a job that I was really deep into. And in the course of doing that, I was notified by a source that there was someone inside the tobacco industry who had been a senior executive in a company willing to talk. That had never happened. And I cultivated this source with the full knowledge of the company, with the legal department, because in those days, the tobacco industry was spending $600 million a year on litigation, trying to keep the untruth that tobacco wasn't addictive, that it wasn't damaging the public health.

And CBS had previously been sued by Brown and Williams Tobacco and lost a $3 million case in Chicago. So there was a lot of tension in those days about the tobacco industry litigation and doing stories like that. And this whistleblower had a bombshell, which was to refute this narrative that the tobacco industry had been pushing, right? The executive had documents that showed that their own company had reverse engineered a Marlboro cigarette and had determined that there was a use of additives that caused the nicotine to get into the bloodstream faster through the lungs.

And that's why people like to get to their Marlboro so fast, because their addiction would be fulfilled by buying and smoking a Marlboro cigarette. It took me a year and a half to get him to go on the record. And when that took place in the summer of 1995, there's a meeting with the general council and the general council came up with this conclusion that we had tortiously interfered with the contract that our source, Jeffrey Wigand, had signed, which was a non-disclosure agreement. They told us that we would get sued in Kentucky because we had violated his contract and had conspired to violate his contract and assist him in doing that.

And a jury would come back and the Brown and Williamson Tobacco would wind up owning CBS. And therefore you couldn't do the story. It was too risky. So I called the president of CBS News and I had a nine o'clock in the morning on October 3rd, 1995. And I said to him, these are just lawyers. What does CBS News say? And he said, the corporation will not risk its assets on this story. A footnote to the controversy about the tobacco piece. So it did not run.

We were dismayed that the management at CBS had seen fit to give in to perceived threats of legal action against us by a tobacco industry giant. We broadcast... So the bottom line is, you have this great source that has agreed to go on the record about what have been a huge bombshell that the tobacco companies were intentionally trying to make the product more addictive. And the lawyers that you're dealing with internally are saying, don't publish this, we'll get sued, it's too risky, and 60 Minutes agrees not to publish.

I would say the lawyer in charge said that. The lawyer in charge. What was your reaction to that at the time? My reaction? I mean, I could have quit right there and then. I decided not to. I decided to fight using any means necessary that I could gather to reverse what had happened. I promised myself I would get out the story of what did happen because this is

information about the public health. People were dying from the effects of nicotine addiction. So it was outrageous, I think to everyone involved actually, that we couldn't run the story, especially because we had found a source, a unique thing, a unique person, because no one else in the industry was available to talk about whatever they did inside that industry. And then the documents did get out there separately, and the story itself was vindicated by a leak of a deposition that appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Everything we knew was public. CBS management wouldn't let us broadcast our original story and our interview with

Jeffrey Wigand because they were worried about the possibility of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against us for tortious interference. But now things have changed. And that's when it finally, four months later, was put on the air. Part of the reason I'm here is I felt that their representation clearly misstated what they commonly knew as language within the company. That we're a nicotine delivery business. And that's what cigarettes are for.

Most certainly. It's a delivery device for nicotine. Because the story ran early February of 1996, finally, other people came out and we did further stories. People from the industry began talking and so on. Why do you think though that 60 Minutes producers agreed to kill the story initially? Like, this is obviously a Tiffany brand of journalism. I think people like myself, especially, associate 60 Minutes with a fierce commitment to independent journalism. Why do you think this was some sort of limit for them?

All news organizations have the limits as to what they will publish or push out, even if it's true. They'll say that they will follow any story wherever it goes without fear or favor or were the costs involved. That's simply not true in a number of different cases. In my case, the company was for sale. There were a number of issues involved. One of the issues was that Larry Tisch and the Tisch family, who owned and controlled

CBS at that point, also owned and controlled Laura Lard tobacco. And when you, that famous scene where you see the seven dwarfs raise their arm and say, I believe that nicotine is not addictive, one of them is the son of Larry Tisch. These are the seven tobacco executives that testified in front of Congress. Right. And so the issue of the ownership of stations by major corporate conglomerates was in the background here. That was something, by the way, that would not have happened 20 years earlier.

There were regulations against that. So basically, the situation you're describing was that the corporate interests of CBS at the time outweighed the journalism. That's essentially what happened, right? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So when you think back on the story that you've just told us, do you think that what has just happened with the settlement with President Trump, does it feel to you like history is repeating itself? In a way, but I think it's a lot worse.

Can you explain why? Well, we know that recently ABC capitulated in a case involving George Stephanopoulos, which was weak. This case was even weaker in terms of the courts. Right. Every legal expert thought it was sort of nonsense. Right. It's nonsense. It's done to intimidate. And so the result will be that you have litigation and it becomes all consuming when you're in the middle of it. And it's not like a case involving tobacco and the pressure that was coming down was easy to see where it would be coming from. This is the president of the United States. This is without precedent in the history of this country.

I just want to push back though a little bit. What does it matter if Trump tries to intimidate the press and CBS says in this settlement, we are not changing our news standards? We might be paying you something, but if the coverage doesn't change, why does this matter? The words are parsed in a way to try and tell you, don't worry, don't worry, we're just paying X amount of money to settle this. It's just a minor thing. The fact is, is that anyone working at 60 Minutes from now on has to worry about what is going to be allowed on the air at

a level that's, how should I put it, not acceptable. 60 minutes had a pretty good run after this whole fiasco over Jeffrey Weigand. The sky didn't fall, right? And I just sort of wonder, is it possible that things will be okay at some point after this, also? Well, we can hope so. But I would say you've got to think twice, three times, four times before you get yourself into a story that might be controversial.

And the new owners who are coming in who are going to buy do not have a long tradition of being in the news business or being respectful of the traditions that it represents. We're at a really grim moment when absurd lawsuits and huge amounts of money come together to damage the public interest. to damage the public interest. So I would say you got to be a little bit depressed about what the future holds. Lowell Bergman, thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you. Bye bye. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. Authorities said that a police officer was shot outside an immigration and customs enforcement detention facility in Texas late Friday night, while a group of about 15 people had slashed the tires on federal vehicles and vandalized security cameras. The detention center, about 28 miles south of Fort Worth, holds people who are awaiting deportation or are accused of violating immigration laws.

Several people were taken into custody in connection with the incident. While their motives remain unclear, the shooting comes amid nationwide protests against the Trump administration's aggressive deportation tactics. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Kaitlyn O'Keefe, Sidney Harper, Nina Feldman, and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Lexi Diao and Paige Cowitt with research help from Susan Lee. Contains original music by Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Marian Lozano, Rowan Niemisto, and Dan Powell and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

Rumburg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.