LOS ANGELES.–CBS News is caught between a rock-and-a-hard place defending the practice of editing a Oct. 7, 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with 60-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris was asked by CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker about whether Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu was deliberately disobeying the White House Mideast policy. “Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region. And we’re not going to stop doing that. We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris told Whitaker in a veritable word salad. CBS Senior Producer Bill Whitaker edited Kamala’s statement for the transcript.
Whatever edits were made on Kamala’s interview on “60 Minutes,” staffers started to question whether the editorial process was appropriate. “Is the edit fine,” as senior editor Bill Owne said, asked a CBS News insider. “Several sources said the discrepancy was preventable, and argued that ‘60 Minutes’ should have taken greater care to ensure consistency between the two interview clips, especially give the high stakes of the presidential election and the scrutiny at the time on Harris’s performance in the interview,” reported Puck News. Owens said, no matter what the settlement by CBS with Trump, he would not, like ABC News host George Stephanopoulos, apologize for what he did. Some unnamed CBS sources said Owens was guilty of “leaving them vulnerable to the situation in the first place,” said Puck News. Owens said his edit of Kamala’s “60 Minutes” transcript was perfectly “fine.”
With pressure mounting on CBS’s parent company Paramount Global to settle the lawsuit, CBS itself does not want to settle. Paramount Global Chairwoman Shari Redstone wants no problem merging Paramount Global with Skydance Media, sometime in the near future. If the lawsuit isn’t settled, it’s doubtful the Federal Communications Commission [FCC] would approve the Merger. CBS staffers threatened to resign, something opposed by CBS reporter Scott Pelley and Anderson Cooper, both saying there were few places in the current media landscape to offer up resistance to the current administration. So, Pelley and Cooper admit that CBC News offers resistance to the Trump White House, something they didn’t do when 82-year-old former President Joe Biden was in power. CBS media bias against Trump hit new deplorable levels.
No one at CBS wants the network to settle a lawsuit with Trump, thinking it would cause too much damage to its brand, like when ABC News admitted publicly that they erred when Stephanopoulos called Trump a rapist. But in many ways admitting that they doctored a transcript to make Kamala look better crosses the line of egregious media bias. “Everyone at the network, all the way up to CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon, opposes the settlement and views it as a gross incursion on press freedom,” Puck News said. But with FCC Chairman Brendan Carr forcing CBS to release the unedited and edited transcripts, the genie is already out the bottle. Trump and his legal team exposed egregious bias with CBS News working overtime to make Kamala look better close to the Nov. 5, 2024 presidential election. More bad publicity only hurts CBS News going forward.
CBS New defended the edit of Kamala’s answers on “60 Minutes” to Bill Whitaker. “As the full transcript shows, we edited the interview to ensure that as much of the vice president’s answers to 60 Minutes’ many questions were included in our original broadcast while fairly representing those answers. 60 Minutes’ hard-hitting questions of the vice president speak for themselves,” CBS News said on its website. CBS News knows that Kamala’s answers were too vague and rambling to have a positive effect on voters. Anyone listening would think she’s deliberately obscuring her answers to Whitaker. Asking whether Netanyahu was listening to the administration also showed CBS News anti-Israel bias, getting Kamala to same something negative about her relationship with Netanyahu. Kamala wanted to hedge before the election on her antagonism toward Israel.
CBS, like all the mainstream media, backed Kamala’s 2024 campaign, no longer even hiding their egregious political bias to the public. Trump won’t back down from his lawsuit to hold CBS News accountable for taking sides in the election. Trump asked FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to revoke CBS’s broadcast license, something not likely to happen. CBS News wants to fight Trump because settling the case looks like they’ve admitted fault for deliberately manipulating the news to make Kamala look better before the election. “To paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness, CBS used its national platform on 60 Minutes to cross the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of the news,” Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit stated. Settling with Trump would give CBS News a big black eye, essentially admitting wrongdoing.
About the Author
John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.
