CBS News President and CEO Wendy McMahon resigned suddenly in the midst of a legal battle between parent firm Paramount and President Donald Trump.
McMahon, who took office in 2023, cited a difference of opinion between herself and the company as the reason for her resignation, according to a memo to staff and reported by Reuters on May 19.
“It’s become apparent that the company and I are not aligned on the future,” McMahon wrote in the memo, as reported by Reuters. “It’s time for me to retire and for this organization to move forward under new leadership.”
CBS’ corporate parent, Paramount Global, began talks with Trump’s lawyers in April over his $20 billion lawsuit against the network’s news show, 60 Minutes. Trump has alleged the program intentionally misled the public in editing an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential race, accusing the network of an effort to “tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party” in the November 5 election.
CBS has been consistently denying the allegations, and legal experts have informed the New York Times that the lawsuit is “baseless.” Yet the lawsuit went into mediation last month, which means Paramount might decide to settle, raising eyebrows over how that would embolden the administration’s growing belligerence towards large media outlets, the New York Times said.
McMahon’s departure is the latest in a series of changes at CBS News during Trump’s legal onslaught.McMahon left after longtime 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens departed last April. Owns, who said he would be exiting the respected show at the close of the season, pointed to editorial freedom concerns in a memo obtained by Reuters.
Owens declared that it had “become apparent that I would not be permitted to run the show as I have always run the show,” per a memo to staff, CBS News reported.
Trump’s contempt for the media goes back years, from his initial 2016 campaign trail days when “fake news” became a common refrain, to this day. The Republican Party leader, in his second term early on, set about preventing the Associated Press from the Oval Office after the president’s rechristening of the Gulf of Mexico, and on March 14 signed an executive order trying to disassemble the federally funded news organization Voice of America. On May 1, the president issued an executive order to withdraw federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, threatening America’s largest public broadcasters PBS and NPR.
The Federal Communications Commission is also launching various investigations into CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, and PBS, as reported by the Committee to Protect Journalists, viewed by press freedom activists as a serious violation of First Amendment rights.