Under fire Trump has gone to war against the media - and he is winning

Bernie Sanders, the venerable socialist senator from Vermont, was not in a mood to pull punches. "[Donald] Trump is undermining our democracy and rapidly moving us towards authoritarianism, and the billionaires who care more about their stock portfolios than our democracy are helping him do it," he fumed in a statement last week.

- By Edward Helmore

Such outbursts have been common in recent months as Sanders has taken up a leading position opposing Trump in his second term, and flagging his concern that the president is waging a war against the media - and winning.

The reason for his ire last week was specific: a deal struck by Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, to pay Donald Trump $16m (£12m) in a donation to his presidential library, the archival centres that many presidents set up after they leave office. The settlement puts an end to the US president's lawsuit over the network's editing of an interview on 60 Minutes, the flagship CBS news magazine show, with the former vice-president Kamala Harris during the 2024 election campaign. Trump claimed - without any serious evidence - that the edit of the interview betrayed bias against him.

Journalists at 60 Minutes countered - and nearly all other observers agreed - that it was just standard editing, common to all major interview segments.

So then why settle? The key may lie with the fact that the super-wealthy Redstone family, which owns Paramount, is seeking to gain approval from Trump administration regulators for an $8bn deal to sell Paramount to the movie studio Skydance - a deal in which they stand to profit with a $2.4bn payday.

"Paramount may have closed this case, but it opened the door to the idea that the government should be the media's editor-in-chief," said the lawyer Bob Corn-Revere of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

No wonder Sanders was angry. He has warned that the deal "will only embolden" Trump to continue attacking, suing and intimidating the media, which the US president has repeatedly labelled "the enemy of the people". It was, Sanders said, a "dark day for independent journalism and freedom of the press".