Updated July 25, 2025 at 2:02 PM CDT
On Wednesday, Trey Parker and Matt Stone — the creators of the satirical show South Park — announced they had struck a $1.5 billion, five-year streaming rights deal with Paramount Global.
That evening, Parker and Stone's long-delayed season debut on Paramount's Comedy Central channel torched the company for canceling CBS' The Late Show with Stephen Colbert —implying that it was done solely to appease one of Colbert's frequent targets: President Trump. (In the episode, a cartoon Trump is shown naked in bed with Satan. It is not an appealing depiction. Nor was it intended to be.)
Paramount Global has said Colbert's cancellation, effective next June, was done solely for financial reasons. It has nonetheless occurred amid a flurry of steps taken by Paramount and Skydance Media — which has been seeking to acquire the media conglomerate — to appease the Trump administration.
On Thursday, federal regulators announced they had voted to approve the deal valued at $8 billion.
Pledges to root out bias in news coverage, and more
Paramount paid $16 million to resolve a lawsuit filed by Trump as a private individual against CBS and 60 Minutes. Skydance CEO David Ellison promised to eliminate all U.S.-based DEI programs at Paramount and to create a new ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias in news coverage. Skydance has not denied Trump's assertions the network will run $20 million worth of public service announcements consistent with his ideological beliefs.
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr cited Skydance's promises to make "significant changes in the once storied CBS broadcast network."
"Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change," Carr wrote in a statement. "In particular, Skydance has made written commitments to ensure that the new company's programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum. Skydance will also adopt measures that can root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media."
On Fox News earlier in the day, Carr took a victory lap over Colbert's cancellation and other concessions by CBS, as well as the stripping of federal funding from public media. "You've exposed the business model of a lot of these outfits as being nothing more than a partisan circus," Carr said on Fox News. "All of this is downstream of President Trump's decision to stand up."
Skydance and Paramount declined to comment.
Last week, Ellison met with Carr to underscore "Skydance's commitment to unbiased journalism and its embrace of diverse viewpoints, principles that will ensure CBS's editorial decision-making reflects the varied ideological perspectives of American viewers," as Ellison's lawyer later wrote in official filings.
David Ellison's father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is bankrolling the deal to buy Paramount, which owns CBS, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures and Comedy Central, among other brands. It had been controlled by Shari Redstone, who wanted to cash out the stake in what remains of the vast media holdings of her late father, Sumner Redstone.
She ultimately told associates the company was too small to compete with the larger digital titans Netflix, Amazon and Apple in an age of broadcast and cable decline. There was no plan B, according to people with knowledge at Paramount and CBS who spoke on condition they not be named, as they were not authorized to speak about the sale.
"A chilling effect"
Trump's lawsuit that CBS and Paramount settled under Redstone was — by nearly all accounts from outside legal experts — incredibly flimsy.
Trump's critics say that was never the point.
"It's primarily about exerting dominance and creating a chilling effect for other actors," says Cornell University law professor Michael Dorf, a constitutional scholar. "It's less that he gets the money, but that the defendants have to fork it over."
Media organizations, he says, will "think twice about putting on news that is adverse to the president's perceived self-interest."
Dorf points to suits that Trump, as a private citizen, has undertaken against other media companies and the administration's formal proceedings and suits against universities and law firms. The settlements - such as Columbia University's agreement to pay $221 million when it has billions at stake over the long run - make sense on an individual basis, he says. But they leave others exposed to the same kinds of pressure.
"What unites all of these cases is that either the administration or Trump personally has a very weak case against the person or entity he's suing," Dorf says. "The more assets a target has, the more vulnerable they are."
A bevy of legal settlements
CBS was the pressure point for Trump: Redstone's plan to sell the company required FCC approval due to the transfer of more than two dozen local stations.
Trump's lawsuit alleged that CBS News had committed election interference by slicing up then-Vice President Kamala Harris' answer to a question about the Israel/Hamas conflict two different ways on different shows. Taken together, the two shows offered viewers Harris' complete answer; Trump's legal team argued the network had sought to make her sound more coherent than she really was.
The suit was filed in a Texas jurisdiction with a judge sympathetic to the president. Under Carr, the FCC revived dismissed complaints against CBS and its local stations over the interview that had been filed by a conservative public advocacy group.
The executive director of 60 Minutes and the president of CBS News and Stations both resigned earlier this year, saying they were opposed to a settlement, especially if it contained an apology. CBS did not apologize as part of the settlement.
ABC News' parent company, the Walt Disney Co., had earlier paid $16 million toward Trump's future presidential library and legal fees. Trump had sued over anchor George Stephanopoulos' mischaracterization of a jury's legal findings in a civil case. That resolution included a note of regret.
Social media giants X and Meta paid Trump's foundation $10 million and $25 million to settle suits over their decision to kick him off their platforms after he claimed to have won the 2020 election against Joe Biden. Elon Musk of X has multibillion dollar contracts with the federal government; Mark Zuckerberg's apps are highly regulated by federal agencies. Both have been hoping for a light touch on AI regulation, which Trump has signaled he supports.
FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, attacked the agency's decision to approve the sale. In a written statement, she said it marked the continued erosion of journalistic independence.
"After months of cowardly capitulation to this Administration, Paramount finally got what it wanted," Gomez wrote. "Unfortunately, it is the American public who will ultimately pay the price for its actions."
"In an unprecedented move, this once-independent FCC used its vast power to pressure Paramount to broker a private legal settlement and further erode press freedom," she said. "Once again, this agency is undermining legitimate efforts to combat discrimination and expand opportunity by overstepping its authority and intervening in employment matters reserved for other government entities with proper jurisdiction on these issues. Even more alarming, it is now imposing never-before-seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the law."
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