Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin at NYT:
CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence.
In an extraordinary declaration, Mr. Owens — only the third person to run the program in its 57-year history — told his staff in a memo that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
“So, having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.
“60 Minutes” has faced mounting pressure in recent months from both President Trump, who sued CBS for $10 billion and has accused the program of “unlawful and illegal behavior,” and its own corporate ownership at Paramount, the parent company of CBS
Katie Robertson and David Enrich at NYT:...
Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a desire to settle Mr. Trump’s case, which stems from what the president has called a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris that aired on “60 Minutes.”
A federal jury on Tuesday ruled against Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and Republican vice-presidential nominee, in her yearslong defamation lawsuit against The New York Times. The jury reached the verdict after two hours of deliberations.
Ms. Palin sued The Times in 2017 after the newspaper published — and then swiftly corrected and apologized for — an editorial that wrongly suggested she had incited a deadly shooting in Arizona years earlier.
The case became a bellwether for battles over press freedoms and media bias in the Trump era, with Ms. Palin’s lawyers saying they hoped to use it to attack a decades-old Supreme Court precedent that makes it harder for public figures to sue news outlets for defamation.
This is the second time a federal jury has concluded that The Times was not liable for defaming Ms. Palin in its editorial. The case first went to trial in 2022, and both the jury and the judge ruled in favor of The Times. But last year, a federal appeals court invalidated those decisions, setting the stage for this month’s retrial.
