On today’s show: NPR’s David Folkenflik explains why CBS stands at the epicenter of Trump’s assault on the media. Immigration arrests in churches? Some clergy say not so fast. Andrea Castillo, federal-immigration reporter for the L.A. Times, has details on the pushback. Trump says minting the 1-cent coin is “wasteful.” Time has what to know about the yearslong debate over whether to stop. Plus, federal authorities appealed an order to unfreeze certain federal spending, Hamas said it will delay the release of the next round of Israeli hostages, and the DOJ ordered prosecutors to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Chapter 1: Why is Trump suing CBS and other media companies?
Good morning. It's Tuesday, February 11th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, what happens when ICE shows up at church, a pretty compelling argument to quit the penny, and the DOJ moves to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. But first, President Trump is aggressively going after media companies in lawsuits and winning.
In December, Disney, which owns ABC News, settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump over a false claim made on the air. It agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump's future presidential foundation. In late January, Meta settled a suit with Trump for $22 million and another $3 million in legal fees over suspending Trump's account after the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Now, President Trump is suing the owner of CBS News, Paramount Global, and he recently doubled down, literally doubling the damage claim from $10 billion to $20 billion.
CBS is the avatar for Trump's multi-front assault on the media and the news media in particular.
Chapter 2: What is the legal basis of Trump's lawsuit against CBS?
NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik told us what's happening at CBS is the latest chapter in Trump's attempt to use the power of the presidency to strong-arm the media. In this particular suit, Trump claims that CBS's 60 Minutes aired a deceptively edited interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris to boost her election chances.
One example Trump's suit gives is a clip of Harris's answer to a question about Israel used on CBS's Face the Nation, which was different from the answer shown in a lengthier broadcast of the same interview on 60 Minutes.
Trump's legal team argued that CBS had engaged in, quote, unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion. What CBS said was this is part and parcel of what journalistic choices involve all the time. What journalists like you are confronted with in compressing a longer interview to meet the time imperatives of the programming
In December, CBS asked the judge to dismiss the case or move it to New York, where CBS is based and where the show in question was edited. The case was filed in a Texas court that's been friendly to conservative interests. Folk Inflect told us legal scholars and media experts say Trump's argument here is weak.
This is frivolous. And I've got to tell you, every legal expert I've spoken to on this say that this is essentially an abuse of the courts. There's no legal grounds that they can point to in precedent that would support this as voter interference. And in fact, of course, Trump won. Trump won in Texas. Trump won in the country. It doesn't feel as though somehow this interview harmed him.
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Chapter 3: How does Trump's lawsuit affect CBS and its merger plans?
CBS says during the campaign, the network also invited Trump to sit down with 60 Minutes, but after agreeing to an interview, he backed out. Further complicating matters, the outcome of this lawsuit will inherently be political. There is a pending sale of CBS News' parent company, Paramount Global, to Skydance Media.
The Paramount-Skydance merger requires the approval of Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr. The L.A. Times says parties involved in the merger want to have the $8 billion deal wrapped by spring. It's been reported by the L.A. Times that the chairwoman of Paramount has instructed her team to settle the Trump suit.
But that arrangement doesn't sit well with journalists at CBS who are calling for Paramount to defend their editorial freedom.
This really is a moment where journalists are watching their corporate owners bend to power. I've talked to former and current executives at CBS and their rivals. I've spoken with legal scholars. I've spoken with corporate attorneys. And I've spoken with journalists.
What is happening now, almost uniformly in the views, is that Trump is exerting pressure to intimidate the press from doing things that he will take issue with. He's also doing it to show that he can do it.
They believe he wants to make sure they don't act as a check on his power and that they are aware that he's going to make it hard for them to do so or raise the pain threshold to them for doing so.
Vanity Fair reports that there are multiple other lawsuits against journalists or journalistic organizations pending. Trump has sued longtime reporter Bob Woodward and his publisher for Woodward's book about Trump. He has sued the Pulitzer Prize board for recognizing a story about Trump.
And he's going after the Des Moines Register and its former pollster, J. Ann Selzer, for publishing a poll ahead of the election suggesting Harris had an edge in Iowa. So far, there are no indications those parties plan to settle. On a recent Sunday in January, Kania Kalindras was at church with her husband and their three children when her husband got a phone call. He didn't answer it.
Soon after, his ICE-appointed ankle monitor went off. That worried him because he always charges it. So he stepped outside to figure out what was going on and to not disrupt the service. Little did he know, immigration agents were there waiting to arrest him and bring him to a detention center to await deportation.
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Chapter 4: What role do churches play in immigration protection?
What many religious leaders told me was that they suspect... they might see a return to the sort of underground railroad type of tactic where they are bringing people in to live in churches or church-affiliated buildings and not saying anything about it so that those folks can avoid arrest by immigration agents.
A number of places of worship have sued the Department of Homeland Security over Trump's order, calling ICE arrests at places of worship a violation of religious liberty. And one pastor told Castillo that he would physically get between his congregants and ICE agents if it came to that.
Aside from making a wish, playing a game of heads or tails, maybe stabilizing a wobbly table, what are pennies really good for these days? In a world where a lot of us don't use cash and definitely don't like to carry around change, does making single cents make any sense? Especially when the cost of producing those small coins is more than double their worth.
That's the argument from President Trump, who is calling to get rid of the penny. And he is far from the first. In 2013, then-President Obama expressed an openness to dumping the penny.
One of the things that you see chronically in government is it's very hard to get rid of things that don't work so that we can then invest in the things that do. And the penny ends up being, I think, a good metaphor for some of the larger problems that we've got.
To all the penny haters, the math speaks for itself. It costs 3.69 cents to make a penny. In 2024, the Mint issued over 3 billion pennies. That means that we lost more than $85 million, making what many people think of as useless coins. And it's not like we've never banished a coin before. Back in 1857, Congress put a stop to the minting of half-cent coins.
But America has long been resistant to the idea of saying goodbye to the penny. In 1989, Congress considered a bill to eliminate pennies in cash transactions and round to the nearest nickel — It didn't pass. Congressman Jim Colby, a Republican from Arizona, made this his mission.
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Chapter 5: How are immigration arrests affecting churches and communities?
He tried and tried to kill the penny, but he said that a couple of things stood in his way, like special interest groups that support zinc mining, which, by the way, pennies are mostly made of zinc, not copper. Also, the fact that the Speaker of the House at the time was from Illinois, the home state of the president whose face is on the penny. Here is Colby on NPR in 2020.
Illinois is the land of Lincoln. So Illinois was not too anxious about getting rid of the penny. So our bill never got much of a hearing at all.
Since then, the main opposition has come from the advocacy group Americans for Common Sense, their pun, not mine, which argues that the government wouldn't save money if the penny were eliminated and that the U.S. Mint would have to make more nickels, which is likely true.
If Congress does decide to get on board with Trump's suggestion and eliminate the penny, we'll almost certainly need to produce more nickels. And we lose far more money making nickels than we do making pennies. Nickels last year cost 13.8 cents each to make. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following.
A federal judge on Monday found the Trump administration hasn't followed his order to unfreeze federal spending and directed the White House to release billions of dollars. The Trump administration quickly appealed the ruling. This is the first time a judge is saying the White House is disobeying a court order.
The ruling comes after several top Trump administration officials have openly questioned the judiciary's authority to check the president's power. Judges have also blocked, at least temporarily, Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship, Elon Musk's access to Treasury Department records, and a mass resignation plan for federal workers.
In what is being called the most serious threat to date of the Gaza ceasefire deal, Hamas said Monday it would delay the next scheduled release of hostages set for Saturday, accusing Israel of violating the terms of the agreement. A Hamas spokesperson said Israel was preventing some displaced Palestinians from returning to northern Gaza and have been targeting them with gunfire and shelling.
Hamas also says Israeli forces aren't allowing relief supplies to enter, as agreed. President Trump weighed in and issued an ultimatum to Hamas on Monday after signing unrelated executive orders in the Oval Office.
I would say cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I'm speaking for myself. Israel can override it. But from myself, Saturday at 12 o'clock, and if they're not here, all hell is going to break out.
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