CBS doesn't care about optics...relatively very few people will read or get interested in this. Plus, megacorps do a gazillion worse things each day.
CBS is doing what it can to settle the first case, so maybe both sides will drop them. If that 24sports site had run it by CBS lawyers I'm almost certain they would have told him not to use his images. But in the end they were used so CBS has to defend itself.
To me using photos of a photog without permission is 100 times worse than posting a screenshot of a TV show but lawyers will milk it.
Pretty much. The 'optics' of a situation are the appearances, the visuals, the perceptions. So when someone says a thing has "bad optics" they mean that it looks bad to observers.
That said, he did come off as a bit of an unhinged person in his twitter tirade.