Donald Trump on Thursday again called for CBS to lose its broadcast license in an early-morning rage post on social media, part of his latest effort to undermine and weaken the news media.
The trigger was the 60 Minutes release of a full, unedited transcript of its interview with Kamala Harris.
Trump has long claimed that an edit in the interview during the 2024 presidential election campaign was deceptive in a way to make Harris look better and improve her electoral chances. In a Face the Nation promo, Harris was shown answering a question about Gaza and Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu that was different than the answer she gave on the 60 Minutes broadcast a day later.
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CBS News has contended that there was no deception, and that the edit was merely for time purposes. One part of the answer was shown on Face the Nation; the other part on 60 Minutes. The unedited transcript confirmed what they have been saying all along.
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But to little surprise, Trump didn’t drop the matter. He filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS last October under Texas’ Deceptive Practices Act, and even though many legal experts see the litigation as dubious at best, sources say that CBS-parent Paramount Global is in talks to settle the matter. The company is seeking regulatory approval of its acquisition by Skydance.
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In this morning’s post, Trump wrote, “CBS and 60 Minutes defrauded the public by doing something which has never, to this extent, been seen before. They 100% removed Kamala’s horrible election changing answers to questions, and replaced them with completely different, and far better, answers, taken from another part of the interview. This was Election changing ‘stuff,’ Election Interference and, quite simply, Election Fraud at a level never seen before. CBS should lose its license, and the cheaters at 60 Minutes should all be thrown out, and this disreputable ‘NEWS’ show should be immediately terminated. With the new Democrat scandal that just arose with respect to USAID illegally paying large sums of money to Politico and other media outlets, the question must me asked, was CBS paid for committing this FRAUD??? Many other questions to come! This will go down as the biggest Broadcasting SCANDAL in History!!!”
On Friday, Trump’s legal team has a court deadline to respond to CBS’ motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
The show said on Wednesday, “In reporting the news, journalists regularly edit interviews – for time, space or clarity. In making these edits, 60 Minutes is always guided by the truth and what we believe will be most informative to the viewing public – all while working within the constraints of broadcast television.”
Editing of interviews is routine across broadcast and cable outlets, including Fox News. In 2022, Tucker Carlson featured an interview on his show with Kanye West, but left out his antisemitic comments and other bizarre claims.
Trump has previously called for CBS to lose its license, as he has other networks, including during his first term. The difference this time is that Brendan Carr, who he appointed FCC chair, revived a conservative group’s complaint against CBS over the 60 Minutes edit, even though his predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, dismissed it on First Amendment grounds.
After CBS News turned over the transcript and video Monday, Carr made the materials public on Wednesday. The show also posted the unedited transcript and video.
“They show – consistent with 60 Minutes‘ repeated assurances to the public – that the 60 Minutes broadcast was not doctored or deceitful,” 60 Minutes said in a statement.
But Carr has opened up a docket on the issue, with a public comment period that will run through March 24. That will add further delay to any resolution of the issue.
Broadcast licenses are not issued to networks, but to individual stations. The complaint was filed against the network’s flagship affiliate, WCBS-TV in New York.
Trump has a long history of filing lawsuits against media outlets — with a number of them dismissed — and of raging at news journalists as the “enemy of the people” for reporting on content he doesn’t like. But in his first term, his FCC chair, Ajit Pai, made clear that the agency “under the law does not have the authority to revoke the license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”
Carr, though, has contended that the complaint needed to be investigated under the FCC’s “news distortion” policy, which subjects licensees to enforcement “if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report.” But the agency acknowledges that its authority is narrow, and that it is “prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press.”
On Fox & Friends this morning, Carr defended his decision to pursue the inquiry.
“There’s a lot of people in this country right now on the radical left that are upset about this investigation into CBS and the work that I’m doing on broadcasters. And to sort of paraphrase Thomas Sowell, when the government has been weaponized in your favor, it feels like discrimination when all of a sudden there’s even-handed treatment. There’s a lot of people that have been on sort of that upper road of the two-tiered system of government.
“And what I’m here to do is apply the law evenly. This is a rare situation where we have extrinsic evidence that CBS had played one answer or one set of words and then swapped in another set. And CBS’ conduct through this, frankly, has been concerning.”
But Robert Corn-Revere, former chief counsel at the FCC, posted an open letter to Carr in the Columbia Journalism Review, writing that courts have frowned on government officials who “use coercive threats to restrict speech.”
Corn-Revere wrote, “The practice of making threats (veiled or otherwise), demanding answers or documents from licensees, or otherwise exerting informal pressure has been sufficiently common that the courts have given it a name: regulation by raised eyebrow. It is also generally called ‘jawboning.’ Some officials believe they can avoid judicial scrutiny if they only act informally, confining their actions to bullying through unofficial actions. But they are wrong.”
He also noted that Carr had recently revived complaints against not just CBS but NBC and ABC, but did not give new life to one against Fox. Rosenworcel had dismissed all four before her departure. Corn-Revere wrote that “the more favorable treatment of Fox, compared with CBS, NBC, and ABC, could lead some cynics to wonder whether the decision might have something to do with the perceived political alignments of the particular broadcasters. Any partisan application of the law would make the First Amendment problem even worse, as you well know.”
Clay Calvert, senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, also questioned Carr’s embrace of the broadcast distortion rule.
Calvert wrote, “Ultimately, Trump should remember that after he leaves office –– either immediately or somewhere down the road –– a Democrat surely will occupy the White House and control a three-person majority on the FCC. The same power Trump now seeks to corral broadcast journalism then will be deployed against Republican-tilting news organizations.”