CBS refusal to release '60 Minutes' Harris transcript is indefensible

By Michael Toth and Matt Mackowiak 
Real Clear Wire

President Trump’s criticism of the CBS "60 Minutes" interview with Kamala Harris has triggered the predictable legacy media meltdown. It’s unfortunate. Trump and Harris supporters should demand CBS come clean about why the network significantly altered Harris’ responses on the Biden-Harris administration’s relationship with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

In ordinary times, all honest, professional journalists and specifically media critics would be dissecting the striking lapse in journalistic ethics at CBS. On the Oct. 6 broadcast of "Face the Nation," the network played an excerpt of the full "60 Minutes" interview that would air on prime time the next day. 

In the preview, CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker first asks Harris whether the U.S. has any “sway” over Netanyahu, and the vice president responds by mentioning “the aid we have given to Israel,” the threat posed by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, and the “imperative to do what we can to allow Israel to defend itself.” 

But when "60 Minutes" aired Harris’ answer, the network spliced together a substantially different response: “The work that we do diplomatically with the leadership of Israel is an ongoing pursuit around making clear our principles.”

The message was clear: no more aid to Israel. No more threats from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. And instead of the necessity of ensuring Israeli self-defense, viewers get a sound bite about the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomatic efforts. 

It gets worse. 

In the prime time "60 Minutes" broadcast, CBS removed Harris’ second answer from the preview clip and swapped in a statement the vice president made in response to a different question. In the substitute answer, Harris declares that the Gaza war must end: “We are 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.”

This tactical move is ethically bankrupt and journalistically indefensible.

The network has disingenuously claimed that the editing was a standard exercise of its authority to trim interviews for time considerations. That rationale might work for the first answer, where CBS trimmed Harris’ four-paragraph answer down to a single sentence, but it completely ignores the second answer substitution, where "60 Minutes" egregiously swapped one single-sentence answer for another. Either way, CBS News would typically post the full interview on their website, as many of their news programs often do. But they didn’t do that here.

Since CBS has declined to fully explain the editing controversy, viewers must speculate why the network substituted a different answer to the same prompt. An obvious possibility is that anti-Israel politics are the real driver here.

As a result of its selective editing, CBS removed Harris’ statements about Israeli aid and self-defense and replaced another answer with a statement calling for a cease-fire, which Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders oppose. On the same day that CBS aired the edited "60 Minutes" interview, the network also rebuked host Tony Dokoupil for his fair but sharp questioning of author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who compared the treatment of Palestinians in Israel to the treatment of African Americans in the Jim Crow South during a recent “CBS Mornings” interview. 

To make matters more interesting, all of this is playing out amid Paramount Global’s (CBS’s parent company) pending sale to Skydance, a media production company run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is staunchly pro-Israel and has signaled he’ll implement massive cost cuts at Paramount. 

Instead of searching for answers from CBS, our mainstream media has focused on blasting President Trump, who has called for CBS to lose its broadcasting license. The Washington Post asserted that Trump’s push for CBS to lose its broadcasting rights “evokes government control of media, which is a hallmark of authoritarianism.”

But as Nathan Simonton, one of the five members of the Federal Communications Commission, has pointed out, the FCC “acts on complaints about distortion, not complaints about editorial positions,” and the commissioners have already “contemplated the possibility of distortionary reporting taking place via splicing” in other cases. That’s another reason CBS must come clean and release the full transcript of the Kamala Harris "60 Minutes" interview. 

Reversing their declining credibility relies on them finally doing the right thing.

Michael Toth is a founding partner of PNT Law based in Austin, Texas. Matt Mackowiak is president of Potomac Strategy Group, LLC, and has served as a senior communications aide to two U.S. senators and a governor.

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