CBS Faces ‘News Distortion’ Complaint

The “disinformation” police are the real criminals this election, guilty of massaging, distorting, and mangling facts to fit their true agenda — stopping Donald Trump and electing Kamala Harris. 

As Election Day looms, more and more Americans understand that the media outlets once trusted as objective news sources have fractured that faith with routine acts of journalistic malpractice. 

Case in point, the slick editing work CBS News did in a “60 Minutes” interview earlier this month with the vice president, the Democratic Party’s replacement presidential nominee.  

The Oct. 6 episode of the network’s “Face the Nation” used a clip to promote that evening’s “60 Minutes” interview with Harris in which the vice president offered her standard word salad answer to correspondent Bill Whitaker’s question about U.S. policy on Israel and the war in Gaza.  

“We supply Israel with billions of dollars in military aid and yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course,” Whitaker said. “The Biden-Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire; he’s resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon; he went in anyway. He has promised to make Iran pay for the missile attack, and that has the potential of expanding the war. Does the U.S. have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?”

“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,” the Democrats’ presidential candidate responded in classic Kamala nonsense.

But that butchered bit of syntax didn’t show up in the “60 Minutes” interview that night. Instead, the segment featured a much clearer, coherent answer to the same question — what appeared to be a refined edit of a longer, meandering  response.

“60 Minutes” correspondent Jon Wertheim defended the doctoring this week during an interview on the  “Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich” sports podcast on OutKick.com.

“Things are edited in every story,” said Wertheim, who also serves as senior correspondent for Sports Illustrated, which has had its own troubles, including credibility issues.  “You do these interviews, and ‘60 Minutes’ segments [are] about 13 minutes and 10 seconds, right?” Wertheim said on the podcast “You spend hours, sometimes days and days, with the subject and, you know, you boil it down to 13 minutes.”

Americans aren’t buying it.

A new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll shows 85 percent of respondents believe CBS should release the full transcript of the conversation between Whitaker and Harris. CBS has released the transcript of the edited interview. 

‘Undermines Democracy Itself’

The Center for American Rights, a Chicago-based public interest law firm, has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission demanding CBS release the unedited 60 Minutes transcript “to set the record straight.”  

“This isn’t just about one interview or one network,” Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, said in a statement. “This is about the public’s trust in the media on critical issues of national security and international relations during one of the most consequential elections of our time.”

“When broadcasters manipulate interviews and distort reality, it undermines democracy itself. The FCC must act swiftly to restore public confidence in our news media,” Suhr added. 

The complaint faces some tough sledding. Earlier this week FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel blasted Trump’s call for CBS to lose its license, asserting the commission “does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

“While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored,” Rosenworcel said. “As I’ve said before, the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy.”

President Joe Biden’s nomination of Rosenworcel as FCC chairwoman in 2021 triggered warnings that the agency would be moving in a “significantly more liberal direction.” She was first appointed as a commissioner by President Barack Obama in 2012, but Trump did reappoint her in 2017. 

‘News Distortion’ 

The Democrat chairwoman may claim she’s standing up for  freedom of the press, but FCC precedent states that “rigging or slanting the news is a most heinous act against the public interest.” 

“The Commission will investigate a station for news distortion if it receives documented evidence of rigging or slanting, such as testimony or other documentation, from individuals with direct personal knowledge that a licensee or its management engaged in the intentional falsification of the news,” the FCC states in a revised 2021 report titled, “The Public and Broadcasting.” “Of particular concern would be evidence of the direction to employees from station management to falsify the news.”

While news organizations have the right to edit their content as they see fit, a common practice for news magazine formats such as “60 Minutes,” the Center for American Rights argues that “CBS crosses a line when its production reaches the point of so transforming an interviewee’s answer that it is a fundamentally different answer.”

“This complaint concerns an act of significant and substantial news alteration made in the middle of a heated presidential campaign,” the filing states. “Moreover, in this instance we have the clear external evidence of outtakes necessary for this Commission to act.”

‘Myopic Zeal’ 

Concerns of bias are only exacerbated by reports that CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon cut checks totaling more than $6,000 to Democrats during the 2020 election. The Telegraph first reported on filings with the Federal Election Commission that show McMahon donated $6,100 to the Biden-Harris campaign and Democratic Party platforms. Interestingly, CBS News staff are prohibited from donating to political parties; McMahon made her contributions while she worked for CBS competitor ABC. 

As The Federalist has reported, The Center for American Rights filed complaints with the FCC and the Federal Election Commission alleging ABC News and its anchors showed “clear sponsor favoritism” for Harris in her early September debate with Trump. The complaint asserts the network and its moderators violated campaign finance and broadcast laws in its one-sided production, including ABC’s decision to fact check Trump while declining to do the same for Harris. 

CBS News has been down the credibility gap road before. The network’s Dan Rather debacle of 2004 instantly comes to mind. The disgraced former news anchor’s phony report on then-President George W. Bush’s National Guard Service record — on “60 Minutes” — should have been a warning to corporate media about the dangers of “myopic zeal” in the abusive, partisan journalism. Instead, they doubled down on their war on conservatives and their love affair with liberals. 

In 2007, CBS News was forced to apologize after its high-priced evening news anchor, Katie Couric, was caught in a plagiarism scandal. Couric’s purported personal essay on her Katie’s Notebook segment was largely lifted from a Wall Street Journal column, the Guardian reported at the time. In 2021, a “60 Minutes” hit piece claiming Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis inked a lucrative deal with grocery store chain Publix to administer the Covid vaccine to benefit a generous campaign donor also drew widespread criticism. 

“In the story, there was a direct line between the campaign contribution and the rewarding [of the Publix vaccine contract]. And they never proved that,” said Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute in a Politifact piece on the “60 Minutes” report. “I think they owe it to everybody — they owe it to the governor, they owe it to Publix, they owe it to the public — to explain to us how they came to that conclusion.”

A CBS News official referred The Federalist to Elita Fielder Adjei, vice president of communications for CBS Stations, She did not return The Federalist’s request for comment. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.