It is a move that Carmine DePasto would have admired. $16 million to settle a lawsuit that many legal minds believe wouldn’t have had much of a chance of succeeding if it had gone to court. However, there was no time for that, as a multi-billion-dollar deal needed to be finalized, and the lawsuit was threatening to derail the agreement.

So, as Carmine would have put it succinctly, “You have to pay.”

That’s precisely what Carmine, in his position as Mayor, would tell Dean Vernon Wormer of Faber College when the two were meeting over plans to hold the annual homecoming parade. “If you want to have a parade in my town, you have to pay.”

Dean Wormer would balk at this demand, stating, “Carmine, I don’t think it’s fair of you to extort money from the college.” It is at this point that Carmine, as both owner of the town’s Oldsmobile dealership and Mayor, sets Wormer straight. “Look, as Mayor, I’ve got big responsibilities. These parades are expensive. You’re using my police, my sanitation people, my free Oldsmobiles. So if you mention extortion again, I’ll have your legs broken.”

It’s reported that Dean Wormer then offered to arrange “a nice honorarium from the student fund.” Because that’s how you got things done back in 1962.

And it appears that it is also how you get things done in 2025, with today’s news that Paramount has settled a 10 Billion dollar lawsuit from the current President of these United States over the baseless claim that CBS News, and its “60 Minutes” program “deceptively” edited an interview with then candidate Kamala Harris in the runup to last November’s Presidential election. In his lawsuit, Donald Trump claimed that the editing was intentionally done to interfere with the election.

In case you have forgotten, CBS made the editorial decision to air two parts of the same answer that candidate Harris gave to a question about Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. As detailed in the transcript of the entire raw interview with Harris, the first excerpt, all of some 21 seconds, aired first on CBS’s Sunday morning staple, “Face The Nation.” In the following “60 Minutes” broadcast, a different 7-second clip from the same answer was included in the story, which presented the longer interview with Harris, who was then the sitting Vice President.

Mr. Trump alleged in his lawsuit that this presentation of two different parts of the interview amounted to “news distortion” and was done intentionally to tip the election in favor of Harris, the Democratic Party’s candidate, and his opponent.

Also, in case you have forgotten, Trump won the November election with 49.8% of the popular vote. His margin of victory was 1.5% over Harris’s 48.3% or just over 2 million votes out of the over 152 million cast. The electoral college total was 312 to 226 in favor of Donald Trump, who is now serving as the 47th President.

There will be much written today, and in the days to come, about the decision by Paramount to make its contribution to a future Trump Presidential Library to the tune of $16 million, which the NY Times reports also includes legal fees incurred by Mr. Trump in the pursuit of the claim. If that $16 million figure sounds familiar, it is because it is the same amount that ABC News, and its parent Disney, paid to settle a defamation claim made last year by Mr. Trump against the network and its anchor George Stephanopolus.

The reason given for the “contribution” to the still-unannounced library being the same amount, is that while Paramount’s board of directors was willing to pay to clear the way for its announced merger with Skydance, it had concerns that shareholders of the company might bring legal action over the terms of the settlement as being “bribery.” Be prepared to hear that term more in the future, as US Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont (both Democrats) have threatened to hold congressional hearings over the matter.

Inside CBS News, the whole matter has taken on Shakespearean proportions. The internal struggle over the question of settling, rather than defending what would have been a landmark First Amendment case, led to the resignation of Bill Owens, the longtime Executive Producer of “60 Minutes,” and then the firing of the President of CBS News and Stations, Wendy McMahon. There will be anticipation that more personnel changes may be forthcoming, including the possible departure of some correspondents from the top-rated news magazine.

The palace intrigue within the offices along West 57th Street is likely to continue into the fall, whenever the merger finally takes place and new corporate management assumes control. That isn’t a given as it turns out. Despite the lawsuit being settled, the Federal Communications Commission still has to weigh in on the merger, as it includes the transfer of the television broadcast station licenses owned by CBS. The Commission, under Chairman Brendan Carr, is conducting its own review of the “60 Minutes” interview, though he claims that its review is “not linked” to the lawsuit brought by the now-President.

Despite the money that will ultimately be paid, perhaps the most interesting detail of the settlement to be revealed so far is the agreement by Paramount/CBS that in the future it will be mandatory to release the full, unedited transcript of any interviews with presidential candidates. Fox News reports that “people involved in the settlement talks have referred to this as the Trump Rule.”

Speaking of the President, a spokesperson for his legal team hailed the announcement of the settlement with the predictable rhetoric of “holding the fake news media accountable.” The person went on to pronounce that “CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle.”

Well, of course, Paramount did have a choice. It could have gone to trial and fought for the journalistic independence that CBS has shown since the days of Edward R. Murrow and later Walter Cronkite. However, instead, the chairwoman of Paramount, Shari Redstone, decided that she had billions of reasons to follow the simple advice of Mayor Carmine DePasto to stage her own version of a “a nice homecoming parade.”

For those who may not recognize the name Carmine DePasto, he is the character played by actor Cesare Danova in the 1978 movie “National Lampoon’s Animal House.” Aside from his meeting with Dean Wormser (brilliantly portrayed by the late John Vernon, while a dead horse is being removed from his office), Carmine also appears later in the movie in the aftermath of the climactic Homecoming Parade scene when the wife of Dean Wormser delivers what may be the most appropriate line of dialogue to end this particularly odious chapter in the history of American Journalism:

“You can take your thumb out of my ass anytime now, Carmine.”