Paramount said late Tuesday that it had agreed to pay President Donald Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” an extraordinary concession to a sitting president by a major media organization.

Paramount said its payment included Trump’s legal fees and costs and that the money, minus the legal fees, would be paid to Trump’s future presidential library.

As part of the settlement, Paramount said it agreed to release written transcripts of future “60 Minutes” interviews with presidential candidates. The company said the settlement did not include an apology.

The deal is the clearest sign yet that Trump’s ability to intimidate major American institutions extends to the media industry. Many lawyers had dismissed Trump’s lawsuit as baseless and believed CBS would have ultimately prevailed in court, in part because the network did not report anything factually inaccurate, and the First Amendment gives publishers wide leeway to determine how to present information.

— The Associated Press

But Shari Redstone, the chair and controlling shareholder of Paramount, told her board that she favored exploring a settlement with Trump. Some executives at the company viewed the president’s lawsuit as a potential hurdle to completing a multibillion-dollar sale of the company to the Hollywood studio Skydance, which requires the Trump administration’s approval.

After weeks of negotiations with a mediator, lawyers for Paramount and Trump worked through the weekend to reach a deal before a court deadline that would have required both sides to begin producing internal documents for discovery, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. Another deadline loomed: Paramount was planning to make changes to its board of directors this week that could have complicated the settlement negotiations.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement that the settlement was “another win for the American people” delivered by the president, who was holding “the fake news media accountable.”

“CBS and Paramount Global realized the strength of this historic case and had no choice but to settle,” the spokesperson said.

The size of the settlement, $16 million, is the same sum that ABC News agreed to pay in December to settle a defamation case filed by Trump against the network and one of its anchors, George Stephanopoulos. Paramount’s board was concerned that paying a higher amount to settle the case could increase the company’s exposure to potential legal actions from shareholders accusing it of bribery.

The sale of Paramount would end the Redstone family’s decades-long control of CBS News and Paramount Pictures and put them in the hands of David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, a tech billionaire who has backed Trump. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has said that the president’s lawsuit against Paramount was not linked to the FCC’s review of the company’s merger with Skydance. Paramount has also said that the two issues were unrelated.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Within the CBS newsroom, a prospective settlement was seen as a low moment in the near-century-long history of a network that once housed Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, whose famed rebuff of McCarthyism in the 1950s was recently depicted on the Broadway stage by George Clooney. “60 Minutes,” which pioneered on-air investigative reporting, recently completed its 51st consecutive season as the country’s most-watched news program.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Trump sued Paramount for $10 billion last year, claiming that “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris in order to interfere with the election.

The transcript of the interview showed that Harris gave a lengthy answer to a question about Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. About 21 seconds of that answer aired in a preview of the interview on “Face the Nation,” another CBS News show. A different seven-second part of the answer aired the next day in a prime-time episode of “60 Minutes.”

Trump said in his lawsuit that CBS’s actions amounted to “news distortion” that was aimed at tipping the scales in favor of the Democratic Party. Paramount disputed that characterization.

Even before its resolution, Trump’s lawsuit — and Redstone’s apparent willingness to entertain a settlement — had engulfed CBS News in turmoil. Tensions within the network over how to handle the president’s legal attacks contributed to the resignation of the “60 Minutes” executive producer, Bill Owens; the CBS News president, Wendy McMahon, was later forced out.

Watching the case with Trump unfold, many CBS journalists believed the long-term credibility of “60 Minutes” was at stake. Scott Pelley, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent, said last month that any settlement would be “very damaging to CBS, to Paramount, to the reputation of those companies.”

Executives at CBS and Paramount applied more scrutiny than usual to segments on “60 Minutes” that could be construed as critical of the Trump administration. CBS News has not killed a story because of the pressure, but Owens, when he resigned in April, said he “would not be allowed” to make independent journalistic decisions. McMahon said when she left that it had “become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”

Redstone told the board she was recusing herself from its discussions of how to handle the Trump suit, given that her financial stake in the pending Skydance deal is so much greater than the stakes of other shareholders, whose interests the directors are expected to represent. This spring, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and has recently been receiving treatment.

Even before her diagnosis, though, she told board members that she wanted the company to explore a settlement with Trump. Redstone has said she wants to avoid a protracted legal war with the president that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardize other divisions that have business with the government.

Redstone has also told confidants that she harbors concerns about the editorial judgment of CBS News. She has acknowledged being troubled by some of her network’s news coverage and on occasion has raised those concerns publicly and spoken to corporate leadership.

(STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS.)

Senators such as Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont have warned that any payment by Paramount to Trump could be construed as a bribe, and they said they would consider holding a congressional hearing about it.

The prospect of being accused of bribery, and perhaps facing legal action because of it, had vexed Paramount’s directors, who had to weigh the corporate benefits of a settlement against the perception that they were greenlighting a deal to secure an unrelated merger.

Freedom of the Press Foundation, a First Amendment group, has said it planned to file a lawsuit on behalf of shareholders against Redstone and the Paramount board in the event of a settlement; the group has retained the prominent litigator Abbe Lowell for its effort.

Paramount is planning to make changes to its board Wednesday. Judith McHale, a long-serving director, is leaving, and the company is planning to add three new directors: Mary Boies, counsel to the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner; Charles E. Ryan, a co-founder of Almaz Capital; and Roanne Sragow Licht, an adjunct professor at Boston University.