Those of us who have worked in legacy media organizations have a pretty good idea why the so-called “mainstream press” has lost so much of its credibility. They ignore politically inconvenient stories. They rewrite history to suit the needs of the present. They punish wrongthinkers. And they promote ideology at the expense of reality.
But for those who still had any remaining doubt, the news out of CBS this week has gone a long way toward answering that question.
Over the past few days, we’ve reported on:
CBS News admonishing one of its top journalists, Tony Dokoupil, for the crime of asking tough questions in an interview.
Shari Redstone, the majority shareholder in CBS’s parent company Paramount, criticizing the network’s executives for their handling of Dokoupil’s interview and its aftermath.
The network’s director of standards and practice ordering CBS journalists to avoid referring to Jerusalem as being “in Israel.”
And cautioning reporters—as Israel’s dead were still being counted on October 8, 2023—against referring to Hamas terrorists as terrorists.
But perhaps the biggest scandal at CBS this week is one we’ve yet to mention. And that’s the interview 60 Minutes conducted with Kamala Harris that has Donald Trump accusing the network of “election interference.”
Here’s the background:
In the interview, veteran journalist Bill Whitaker asked presidential candidate Harris about whether Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was listening to the Biden-Harris administration. Harris offered a response that can be generously characterized as word salad: “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.”
Or at least, that’s what her answer was in a teaser clip from the interview that ran on Sunday’s Face the Nation, which was widely derided on social media.
See it for yourself:
But by the time the interview aired in a prime-time 60 Minutes special on Monday night, Harris’s answer to the same question was very different. The Democratic nominee offered a relatively clear, succinct response: “We’re 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.”
Here’s the version that aired on 60 Minutes:
The edit suggests a possible violation of the CBS News standards guide, which states that “answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response.” It goes on to say: “We cannot create an answer merely because we wish the subject had said it better,” and that journalists should “always edit interviews in a straightforward manner to preserve the sense of the interview.”
You don’t need to be a broadcast journalist to understand why these are important rules. Excessive editing distorts reality—which is the opposite of what good journalism is supposed to do.
Given the fact that editing can mislead viewers, broadcasters will often release a full unedited transcript of important interviews. It’s what CBS itself did in 2020 when Catherine Herridge interviewed Donald Trump. As Herridge, who no longer works for CBS, explained on X this week, full transcripts are “about transparency and standing behind the integrity of the final edit.”
Given the stakes here—a rare interview with a presidential candidate a month before a very close election—you would think CBS would do the same. But no transcript has been forthcoming.
Because of that, we still don’t know Harris’s answer to an important question—one with profound political and diplomatic ramifications. It’s a question that’s easy to answer. Or should be.
We asked 60 Minutes if they’d make the transcript available, and why they hadn’t done so already. They did not respond.
We also asked the Harris campaign if they might be able to help. It is standard practice for politicians’ aides to record interviews like this. Does the Harris campaign have an unedited recording or full transcript of the interview? We didn’t get an answer. (When asked about the interview by other outlets, the Harris-Walz campaign has said, “We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS.”)
Trump, meantime, has taken this and run with it in exactly the way you’d imagine. On Thursday, he tweeted: “60 Minutes is a major part of the News Organization of CBS, which has just created the Greatest Fraud in Broadcast History. CBS should lose its license, and it should be bid out to the Highest Bidder, as should all other Broadcast Licenses, because they are just as corrupt as CBS—and maybe even WORSE!”
Overblown? Perhaps. But the media invites such criticism when it breaks trust with the public by appearing to ride roughshod over their own rules. Or deny obvious truths like the location of the Israeli capital or the fact that members of Hamas are terrorists.
There’s an irony to this story. The same network that has been warning, along with the rest of the legacy press, about the dangers posed by misinformation, deepfakes, and AI-generated distortions just concocted a deception of its own.
CBS was the only legacy outlet to score an interview with Harris during her campaign’s media blitz. Harris eschewed other traditional news platforms for Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, Howard Stern, and the Call Her Daddy podcast.
Some journalists howled that Harris was icing out real reporters in favor of podcasters and late-night talkers. We may have agreed with that umbrage a few years ago. But when 60 Minutes appears to mislead its viewers in order to protect a presidential candidate less than a month before an election, then they may as well just call her daddy.
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