{"id":115707,"date":"2025-11-04T23:05:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T23:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/115707\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T23:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T23:05:08","slug":"trump-60-minutes-ratings-interview-scores-14-million-viewers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/115707\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump ’60 Minutes’ Ratings, Interview Scores 14 Million Viewers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPresident Trump\u2019s edited interview with CBS News<\/a>\u2018 \u201c60 Minutes<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a year after he sued the newsmagazine over its editing practices and extracted a multimillion-dollar payout \u2014 scored big ratings for the program.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Nov. 2 airing of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d featuring Trump\u2019s interview<\/a> drew 14 million total viewers and 3 million viewers in the 25-54 demo, according to Nielsen Panel + Big Data ratings. The CBS newsmagazine delivered its best audience since Jan. 10, 2021. For the 2024-25 season, \u201c60 Minutes\u201d averaged 8.32 million viewers for the 2024-25 season, according to Nielsen data.<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump was interviewed by Norah O\u2019Donnell, CBS News senior correspondent and a contributor to \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d It was Trump\u2019s first interview with \u201c60 Minutes\u201d in five years. During the interview, Trump boasted that \u201c\u201860 Minutes\u2019<\/a> paid me a lotta money\u201d<\/a> to settle his lawsuit over its editing of an interview with then-VP Kamala Harris and he praised the takeover of Paramount by David Ellison\u2019s Skydance Media \u2014 but those comments were edited out of the version that aired on CBS.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c\u201860 Minutes\u2019 paid me a lotta money,\u201d Trump said.\u00a0\u201cYou don\u2019t have to put this on, because I don\u2019t wanna embarrass you, and I\u2019m sure you\u2019re not \u2013 you have a great \u2013 I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, who\u2019s the young woman that\u2019s leading your whole enterprise is a great \u2013 from what I know.\u201d Trump was referring to Bari Weiss, appointed as editor-in-chief of CBS News last month after Paramount Skydance bought her outlet The Free Press in a $150 million deal. About Weiss, Trump said, \u201cI don\u2019t know her, but I hear she\u2019s a great person.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRegarding the Ellison family\u2019s acquisition of Paramount, parent of CBS, Trump said, \u201cI see good things happening in the news. I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership. I think it\u2019s the greatest thing that\u2019s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump is friendly with Larry Ellison, the ultra-wealthy founder of Oracle. Last month, Trump said, \u201cLarry Ellison is great, and his son David is great. They\u2019re friends of mine. They\u2019re big supporters of mine. They will make the right decisions. They\u2019re going to revitalize CBS \u2014 hopefully, they\u2019ll bring it back to its former glory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump told O\u2019Donnell that \u201c60 Minutes\u201d was \u201cforced to pay me a lot of money because they took [Harris\u2019] answer out that was so bad, it was election-changing, two nights before the election. And they put a new answer in. And they paid me a lot of money for that. You can\u2019t have fake news. You\u2019ve gotta have legit news. And I think that it\u2019s happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump\u2019s claim that \u201c60 Minutes\u201d paid him is not technically correct. In fact, parent company Paramount Global agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit that alleged \u201c60 Minutes\u201d deceptively edited Harris\u2019 responses in a way that somehow had damaged Trump and misled voters.<\/p>\n

\n\tResponding to an FCC demand, CBS News released a full transcript of the Harris interview, which showed it had not altered the substance of her remarks. Legal experts said Paramount would easily have won in court, and initially Paramount and CBS News sought to have the case tossed<\/a>. However, former Paramount controlling shareholder Shari Redstone pushed the company to resolve the case out of court<\/a>, which paved the way for the Trump administration\u2019s approval of the Skydance Media $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global.<\/p>\n

\n\tCBS News on Sunday released a transcript<\/a> of the full 90-minute session with Trump and posted most of the rest of its\u00a0on YouTube<\/a>. About one-third of O\u2019Donnell\u2019s interview with Trump was aired on TV.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe interview covered a wide range topics, from international politics to ICE raids in the U.S. to the economy and healthcare police to the federal government shutdown. Much of the interview was devoted to O\u2019Donnell\u2019s questions about the president\u2019s views on geopolitical hot spots and challenges the U.S. faces in dealing with Russia, China, Israel, Venezuela and other unpredictable situations. The interview was recorded Oct. 31 at Trump\u2019s Mar-a-Lago compound in Palm Beach, Fla. <\/p>\n

\n\tO\u2019Donnell questioned Trump about the conflict of interest involved in his role as U.S. president and his family investments in crypto and the marketing of Trump-branded crypto currencies. Trump was dismissive in his reply: \u201cI can\u2019t say, because \u2014 I can\u2019t say \u2014 I\u2019m not concerned. I don\u2019t \u2014 I\u2019d rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it. You just came to me and you said, \u2018Can I ask another question?\u2019 And I said, yeah. This is the question\u2013.\u201d At which point O\u2019Donnell interjected, \u201cAnd you answered\u2013\u201d before Trump continued, \u201cI don\u2019t mind. Did I let you do it? I coulda walked away. I didn\u2019t have to answer this question. I\u2019m proud to answer the question.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump said, \u201cWe\u2019re number one in crypto in the whole world. Other people wanna be. They\u2019re fighting like hell to be. But we\u2019re number one in crypto because I\u2019m the president. Biden wanted to also, at the very end, you know, he totally switched his thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tO\u2019Donnell also asked Trump about his pardon of \u201ccrypto\u2019s richest man, a billionaire known as CZ.\u201d She was referring to former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who in 2023 pleaded guilty to U.S. government charge<\/a> of failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program on the crypto exchange. Zhao was sentenced to four months in jail and released in September 2024.<\/p>\n

\n\tTrump responded, \u201cOkay, are you ready? I don\u2019t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. And what I wanna do is see crypto, \u2019cause if we don\u2019t do it it\u2019s gonna go to China, it\u2019s gonna go to \u2014 this is no different to me than AI.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Trump\u2019s edited interview with CBS News\u2018 \u201c60 Minutes\u201d \u2014 a year after he sued the newsmagazine over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115708,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[73297,4521,54,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-115707","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-60-minutes","9":"tag-cbs-news","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-top-news","14":"tag-top-stories","15":"tag-topnews","16":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}