CBS News was once one of the defining news outlets in the world. Whether it was Edward R. Murrow reporting live from London during the Blitz in World War II or Walter Cronkite’s coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, generations of Americans turned to CBS for fair, accurate reporting on the most important issues of the day.
No longer.
CBS News now stands accused of deliberately distorting its news coverage for nakedly political purposes, to prop up Kamala Harris’ flailing presidential campaign by attempting to hide her inability to answer even simple questions about her policy positions and how she would act if elected president.
How badly skewed was CBS’s coverage of its interview with Harris, broadcast to the world on “Face the Nation” and “60 Minutes?” Well, last week, the nonprofit group Center for American Rights (CAR) filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission alleging deliberate news distortion, a violation of FCC regulations and a half-century of precedent.
In this complaint, CAR lawyer Daniel Suhr contends that the evidence of illegal news distortion by CBS could not be clearer: In two different news programs, CBS broadcast the same question, followed by two very different answers from Harris, resulting in a situation where “the general public no longer has any confidence as to what the Vice President actually said in response to the query.” This goes well beyond mere editorial oversight of an interview — picking what to include and what not to include — and instead constitutes a violation of the public trust that the news material CBS presented was in any way factual.
Responding to the complaint in a Fox News interview, FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington indicated that he is taking this matter seriously: “[G]oing to the news is an act of extending trust,” he stated, and “the thing about trust is that once it’s lost, it’s very difficult to regain.”
Compounding the problem is the fact that CBS has thus far refused to release a full, unedited transcript of its interview with Harris, as is typical with such interviews. In fact, on Sunday, the network released a statement standing by its edit — while taking several swings at former president and Harris’ opponent Donald Trump — writing:
Former President Donald Trump is accusing 60 Minutes of deceitful editing of our Oct. 7 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That is false.
60 Minutes gave an excerpt of our interview to Face the Nation that used a longer section of her answer than that on 60 Minutes. Same question. Same answer. But a different portion of the response. … The portion of her answer on 60 Minutes was more succinct, which allows time for other subjects in a wide ranging 21-minute-long segment.
Remember, Mr. Trump pulled out of his interview with 60 Minutes and the vice president participated.
As Trump’s campaign said in response to the statement, “60 Minutes just admitted to doing exactly what President Trump accused them of doing. They edited in a different response — from another part of her answer — to make Kamala Harris sound less incoherent than she really was. Their statement is not a denial, it is an admission that they did exactly what they were accused of.”
CAR is demanding that the FCC compel the release of the transcript, but unless and until the FCC takes action, CBS cannot run away from the fact that it is deliberately distorting the public record at the very height of a presidential election.
Unfortunately, CBS is no stranger to election-rigging news controversies. On Sept. 8, 2004, at the height of that contentious presidential election, “60 Minutes” anchor Dan Rather breathlessly covered the damning “Killian memos,” which purported to prove that President George W. Bush had shirked his responsibilities to the Texas Air National Guard decades earlier. The only problem was that the Killian memos were quickly proven by internet sleuths to be clumsy modern-day forgeries. Rather was quickly put out to pasture and staffers were fired, but clearly CBS did not learn its lesson — its willingness to distort the truth for nakedly political purposes remains apparently unaltered two decades later.
The American people should be able to trust that the news they watch is not deliberately distorted. The FCC has a responsibility to ensure that its licensees do not break the law. And CBS — if it wants to restore the trust that so many once had in its news broadcasts — needs to come clean.
What did Kamala Harris actually say?
Will Scharf is Of Counsel to the James Otis Law Group and an attorney for President Donald J. Trump. He has previously served as a federal prosecutor and worked on the confirmations of Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
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