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Once in a While We Need to Look At Corruption
Paramount and Noem, Big and Small
mister mix
July 02, 2025
Let’s start with the breaking news:
Donald Trump has reached a $16m settlement with Paramount, the parent of CBS News, over what he claimed was false editing of a pre-election interview with the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris, in what is likely to be seen as a further example of capitulation by media companies hoping to smooth the waters with Trump.
Trump had filed a $10bn lawsuit against the company in October, one of a string of legal actions against US media conglomerates over what the US president maintains was biased, incorrect or “fake” news reporting.
In a late-night announcement, Paramount – which is preparing for a $8.4bn merger that requires approval from the the US Federal Communications Commission, headed by Trump loyalist Brendan Carr – said it would pay the sum to settle the suit.
Here’s a story that came out the other day:
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.
In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.
Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.
The Paramount cowardly compliance is the big story here, of course, but Noem lining her pockets is pure Trumpism: relatively small potatoes and violating ethics rules that she and the rest of them don’t care about.
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