(Headline USA) CBS News’s 60 Minutes claimed this week that it did not edit its interview with Vice President Kamala Harris to make the Democratic candidate look better, but it nonetheless refused to release the full transcript of the interview with Harris to prove as much, CNN reported.
After coming under fire from former President Donald Trump’s campaign last week for airing two different answers from Harris to the same question, CBS released a statement on Sunday insisting its edit of Harris’s remarks was not meant to be “deceitful.”
A statement from 60 Minutes: https://t.co/skHTnVRO1C pic.twitter.com/v9oWoce6r0
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 20, 2024
“Former President Donald Trump is accusing 60 Minutes of deceitful editing of our Oct. 7 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That is false,” the statement began.
“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 outlet added.
CBS went on to claim that it edits its interviews with every politician in this way to make answers “more succinct.”
The Trump campaign, however, pointed out that 60 Minutes admitted “to doing exactly what President Trump accused them of doing. They edited in a different response—from another part of [Harris’s] answer—to make Kamala Harris sound less incoherent than she really was.”
Moreover, if 60 Minutes was really trying to act in an unbiased way, it would release the full transcript of its hourlong interview with Harris, the Trump campaign argued.
Other proponents of journalistic integrity pointed out that there were precedents—mostly during the Trump administration—of CBS News providing that level of transparency.
This statement is an indicator @CBSNews hasn’t contained the fallout from its Kamala Harris @60Minutes edit.
Releasing the full unedited transcript is consistent with journalistic transparency and it stands behind the integrity of the entire Kamala Harris edit, not just the… pic.twitter.com/7HoBtTxQ33
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) October 21, 2024
Meanwhile, critics have observed that while the network edited its interview with Harris to make her answer more coherent, it did the opposite in a recent interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., for which CBS removed important context to make the answer nonsensical.
The controversy over Harris’s interview with 60 Minutes began after the show shared a promotional video of the interview on social media, showing Harris give a word-salad response to a question about the Biden administration’s response to the conflict in the Middle East.
When the interview aired in primetime, a shorter answer from Harris to that same question was shown instead.
CBS and 60 Minutes have not said whether they will ever make the full transcript of the Harris interview available to the public.
