10/22/2024

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Kamala Harris speaking at an event this week – KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP

“That is false,” intoned a terse statement from CBS News on Sunday evening, in a belated denial that 60 Minutes, the network’s once-respected weekly television news magazine, allegedly deceitfully edited its October 7 interview with Kamala Harris. The edit’s widely suspected purpose was to make Harris, who notoriously struggles with any form of unscripted speaking, appear more coherent and competent on the question of US support for Israel’s war with Hamas.

CBS’s denial addressed no specific aspect of the Vice President’s interview, but unconvincingly maintained “we strive to be clear, accurate and on point. The portion of [Harris’s] answer on 60 Minutes was more succinct, which allows time for other subjects.” Presumably, her fuller answers were less succinct and might have distracted from other subjects in a way that might well have disfavoured her.

Obviously, the best way to answer such a critique would be to release the interview’s full transcript and allow the public to decide whether it had been fooled. After a week of scathing coverage, the issue weighed heavily enough that Harvard CAPS/Harris, a highly respected public survey organisation, conducted a nationwide poll on that very question.

It found that some 85 per cent of American voters – including an astonishing 87 per cent of Democrats – believe that CBS should release the full transcript. The network, however, released no materials and maintained another week of stony silence before dropping its denial on a Sunday evening, perhaps in the hope that it would be the least likely time anyone would pay attention to it.

Related video: CBS responds to allegations of deceitful editing in ’60 Minutes’ Harris interview (Straight Arrow News

Straight Arrow News

CBS responds to allegations of deceitful editing in ’60 Minutes’ Harris interview

Rather than strive for transparency, CBS instead tried to dump blame on Trump, implying that he alone, and not anyone else in the network’s rising chorus of critics, had accused it of deceitful editing. Without a trace of irony, CBS further admonished anyone reading its denial, “Remember, Mr. Trump pulled out of his interview with 60 Minutes and the vice president participated,” and repeated its invitation for the Republican nominee to appear on the programme.

It takes little imagination to wonder why Trump pulled out of his 60 Minutes interview and will almost certainly not appear on the network before the November 5 election. Like most American legacy media outlets, CBS has long exhibited overtly Leftist bias in general and bias against Trump and his campaign in particular.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, in a bestselling book aptly titled Bias, award-winning CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg spilled a searing insider’s view of the network’s political favouritism toward the Left. Just last month, a report by the Media Research Center, a Virginia-based analytical watchdog, found that CBS’s coverage of Harris’s campaign had been 94 per cent positive, while its coverage of Trump was 77 per cent negative.

In the CBS News-hosted 1 October vice-presidential debate between Republican candidate JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz, the network’s moderators violated a much-touted pre-debate pledge not to engage in “fact checking” of either candidate, only to “fact check” Vance while leaving Walz virtually unchallenged. Last week, House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson accused CBS’s Face the Nation programme of selectively editing an interview he gave on October 13.

CBS’s bracing arrogance and evident favouritism for Harris’s campaign raise fundamental questions about the future of America’s troubled legacy media. But the court of public opinion already seems to be gravitating against CBS, which had the lowest ratings of America’s “Big Four” television networks before Harris’s interview.

As American television audiences vote with their remote controls, it is entirely conceivable that this year’s election will be the last in which Republican candidates agree to participate in media events hosted by biased and increasingly discredited legacy television media outlets. In all likelihood, Americans will overwhelmingly forgive them.

Paul du Quenoy is president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute

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