Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with another big media company caving into Trump's extortion,

with Paramount having settled Trump's $20 billion nuisance lawsuit against CBS's 60 Minutes

for $16 million so that Shari Redstone's $8 billion merger with Skydance Media can go through.

Joining us to assess how Trump is picking off the media companies one by one,

as he has done with big law firms and major universities, is Paul Farie, who was a reporter

for the Washington Post for 35 years. He covered business,

a presidential campaign and the news media, and left at the end of 2023, and has been a

freelance writer contributing to the Atlantic Neiman Reports, The Daily Beast and the Columbia

Journalism Review. Then as the House moves to reconcile its dreadful bill

with the Senate's even more onerous, big, beautiful bill,

rushing to meet the 4th of July deadline to please their dear leader,

we will speak with Patrick Sullivan, a postdoctoral associate

at the Institution for social policy studies,

American Political Economy Exchange at Yale University, and at the University of Constance, Germany.

He is a researcher at the Politics of Inequality Research Cluster at the University of Constance,

and his research interests include tax policy, economic inequality,

and redistributive preferences. We will discuss his article at the New York Times with Jacob Hacker.

How awful is the Republican bill? Here are four of its worst parts.

Then finally, as Trump uses war and the threat of war against Canada, Greenland and Panama

to gain territory and extract economic gains, we'll examine his refusal to seek approval

...