CBS News’ use of dishonest editing to replace one of Kamala Harris’ famous word salads with a less embarrassing answer in her “60 Minutes” appearance is probably the “biggest scandal in broadcast history,” former President Donald Trump told podcast host Joe Rogan in an interview Friday night.
In the three-hour interview — which had accrued a million views within the first two hours of being published on YouTube — Trump and Rogan discussed everything from the Republican’s economic and foreign policy to personal anecdotes like how President Trump reacted to seeing the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House for the first time when he moved in.
About half an hour in, Trump’s attention turned to the “crooked” corporate media.
“They’re diminishing themselves, they’re killing all their credibility,” Rogan agreed.
But CBS News’ recent substitution of Harris’ bad answer for a better one, Trump said, was “the worst I’ve ever seen.” After releasing a preview clip of Harris’ interview that included a nonsensical response to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, CBS removed her response entirely in the “full” version of the interview and dropped in a completely different answer. The original answer is conspicuously missing from the transcript that CBS released, and the network’s continued refusal to release an unedited transcript has sparked speculation that it may be hiding even more outrageous edits or even let the vice president re-do her answers.
“Kamala goes on ’60 Minutes,’ gave an answer that a child wouldn’t give, it was so bad, and ’60 Minutes’ took the answer out, they took the whole — and they put another answer in, which didn’t make sense either but it was better,” Trump said.
“They edited it deceptively,” Rogan added.
“It wasn’t editing, it was fraud!” Trump countered. “This was not editing. You know, editing is where I’ll give an answer and they’ll take a couple of words and change around, or they might even take a sentence or two off, which is very bad … but I’ve never heard, I think it’s the biggest scandal in broadcast history, what happened at CBS.”
“She gives an answer that shows that she’s essentially incompetent,” he continued, “and they took the answer — can you imagine them doing that for me?”
“It’s drastic,” Rogan said, “but what’s interesting was the other full version was available initially, it was like a preview, somebody put that preview out.”
“Somebody made a big mistake, some kid put the preview out, and then the bosses did this or that, and then all of a sudden they said we got a problem,” Trump said. “This is election interference.”
CBS News has been slapped with a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) complaint for “news distortion.”
Trump also brought up the pile-on he faced from ABC News during the only presidential debate between Trump and Harris, which took place in September. Trump found himself effectively dodging attacks from not just his Democrat opponent but also from ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis.
“It was like, how many people am I debating here?” he told Rogan. “I got this one and I got you two.”
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.
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