CBS has asked the Federal Communications Commission to end its investigation into edits of its “60 Minutes” Kamala Harris interview, arguing that the federal government risks becoming “a roving censor” trampling on free speech rights.
President Trump was furious over last October’s “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Harris in the closing weeks of the campaign. The president and other conservatives chided CBS after it was revealed that “60 Minutes” producers had edited Harris’ jumbled response to a question about the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Trump sued CBS for $20 billion, claiming the edits amounted to election interference. The president has demanded “a lot” of money to settle the case, which many 1st Amendment experts call “frivolous.”
The controversy over the “60 Minutes” edits wound up before the FCC last fall when a conservative nonprofit group, the Center for American Rights, filed a news distortion complaint against CBS and its flagship television station, WCBS-TV Channel 2, in New York.
“CBS distorted the news by using its slice-and-dice method of journalism to justify cleaning up the Vice President’s muddled and meandering answer,” the center said in a filing with the FCC, arguing that “60 Minutes” producers had become “the vice president’s cleanup crew.”
The FCC, until recently, has typically taken a hands-off approach to complaints about editorial decisions, and court cases have set a high bar for such claims. The FCC has said it would “only investigate claims that include evidence showing that the broadcast news report was deliberately intended to mislead viewers.”
The Center for American Rights lodged its FCC complaint in mid-October, ahead of Trump filing his lawsuit against CBS in federal court in Texas. The lawsuit is still pending. CBS has asked a judge to dismiss the matter or move the case to New York, where CBS is based. The two sides also have agreed to the judge’s request that they present their arguments to a mediator.
“The complaint filed against CBS for ‘news distortion’ envisions a less free world in which the federal government becomes a roving censor — one that second guesses and even punishes specific editorial decisions that are an essential part of producing news programming,” the Paramount Global-owned network argued Monday in its response to the FCC inquiry into the edits.
Late last year, the Democratic former FCC chairwoman threw out complaints filed against CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox.
But Trump’s pick to lead the agency, Brendan Carr, quickly revived the CBS, NBC and ABC complaints.
First Amendment experts sounded alarms, saying the FCC was wading into treacherous territory in reviewing debate formats and decisions made by news producers. Carr demanded that CBS turn over the raw transcript and unedited interview, which it did.
Video of the unedited interview, released last month by the FCC and separately by CBS, confirmed the network’s account. But the release also highlighted that Harris’ convoluted answer had been clipped to its most succinct and cogent sentence.
Vice President Kamala Harris talks to “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker.
(CBS News)
“The essence of the Complaint — that CBS somehow broke the law by airing a portion, but not all, of a candidate’s answer to a question in a news magazine program — is fatally flawed,” CBS said in its petition.
News organizations routinely edit interviews, removing extraneous words and redundant phrases. The practice has long been accepted as long as the edits don’t change the context or meaning.
CBS noted the U.S. Supreme Court has never “recognized a sweeping right by the government to second guess editorial decision-making.”
An FCC ruling against the network “would set a dangerous precedent that would enable the federal government to chill news coverage deemed unfavorable to whichever party were in power at a given moment in time,” CBS said.
But Daniel Suhr, president of the center, said Monday that broadcasters with FCC licenses, including CBS, have a duty to act in the public interest.
“CBS’s behavior here underlines why the public no longer trusts the supposed trustees of the public’s airwaves,” Suhr said.
The “60 Minutes” case has sparked clashes within Paramount. Journalists have called on the company to defend its flagship broadcast and journalists’ 1st Amendment rights.
Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has agitated for the Trump lawsuit to be settled to clear the way for her sale of the company to David Ellison’s Skydance Media. The $8-billion transaction requires the approval of the FCC.
Lawyers say that Trump would have had a difficult time arguing the “60 Minutes” interview harmed him because the question did not reference him. Instead, it was about the Biden administration.
Trump has said he thinks certain TV stations should lose their FCC licenses.
The “60 Minutes” did not appear to diminish Trump’s standing among voters; he was elected president a month later.