By appearing Monday on the Fox News Channel’s America’s Newsroom, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr showed he’s not messing around by reminding CBS News that Monday was deadline day for them to turn over the full transcript of its October 2024 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Monday could shape out to be quite the headache for CBS as the network was also barreling towards a possible settlement with former President Trump over a lawsuit he filed over said Harris lovefest in which answers were rearranged to make her more cogent.
After co-host Dana Perino played the clips in question, Carr explained where the FCC comes into play, specifically whether CBS violated its news distortion policy that broadcast networks are subjected to by being over-the-air (i.e. available via rabbit ears):
We have sought the unedited copy of the transcript and the video from this interview and it’s part of an FCC investigation. There was a complaint filed under something called the news distortion policy and that’s a 50-year-old policy at the FCC that applies to broadcasters, so not cable like Fox News, and the policy says you can’t, you know, swap answers out to make it look like somebody said something entirely different. The classic case of someone says yes to an answer and you splice in a no answer. Here it’s usually very difficult to make out news distortion complaints. You don’t want the FCC leaning in too heavily on this....It’s due today. And I expect CBS to provide it by the end of the day to see what in fact was said as part of our own news distortion investigation.
Asked by Perino about potential “consequence[s],” Carr said the agency would be “open-minded” and thus CBS could be open to “the full suite of FCC options that are on the table that apply to any broadcast licensee.”
He also blasted his predecessor (Jessica Rosenworcel, appointed by President Barack Obama) for having “summarily dismissed this complaint, but I’m not sure how you can do that without seeing the actual video”
Perino’s last question was exactly the right one: “[W]ill that transcript become public so all of us can read it or because of the investigation, do you hold onto it?”
Carr first said he hadn’t “made a final decision,” but tipped his hand by acknowledging “transparency here is incredibly important” in which “the American public ultimately deserves to see this for themselves.”
“And what’s interesting is CBS releases other transcripts. For instance, the Face the Nation interview recently with Vice President Vance? They released the full, unedited transcript there, but for some reason, they haven’t done it here,” he astutely noted.
As for the Trump lawsuit, The New York Times reported Thursday that “many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with....Skydance, an entertainment company backed by the billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son David.”
The Times added a settlement — which ABC agreed to with Trump over March 10, 2024 comments made by George Stephanopoulos — “could also cause an uproar within CBS News” that settling would be “tantamount to a politician’s standard-issue gripes about a news organization’s editorial judgment.”
Puck’s Dylan Byers confirmed this possible scenario on Friday, calling it likely “[b]arring some unforeseen twist of fate” and it’d be “tens of millions of dollars to the Trump Presidential Library.”
He dished tea on the uproar among the bloodthirsty Trump haters at the network, specifically 60 Minutes and stalwarts Scott Pelley and Lesley Stahl (click “expand”):
Shari’s impending settlement has left CBS News journalists, and particularly 60 Minutes staff, in an uproar. Scott Pelley and Lesley Stahl, two of the most veteran 60 Minutes correspondents, are irate over the decision, according to their colleagues. Network sources say they would not be surprised to see some staffers resign or speak out publicly if and when the settlement is made. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, some are questioning why CBS News C.E.O. Wendy McMahon and 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens are not standing up more forcefully for the news division. Many of those folks were already upset with McMahon and Owens for changes at Evening News (Owens is now E.P. on that show, too) that seem to leave little room for the day’s political news: “Bad enough we have a revamped national evening newscast barely covering the incredibly sweeping and consequential first full week of President Trump,” one correspondent texted me. “Now we get word we have an owner also eager to settle with him?”
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In any event, the whole affair highlights the indignity of this particular moment in American journalism. It’s not enough that once-storied news organizations must suffer through the contractions of their newsrooms, the inexorable decline of their influence, the diminishment of talent salaries, and so forth.
On Sunday night, Semafor’s Max Tani reported “CBS News staff are bracing for an all-but-inevitable” settlement over the selectively edited Harris answers on Israel, which “virtually no one at the network actually believes was flawed” and would be an “ominous sign for a broadcast news industry[.]”
To see the relevant FNC transcript from February 3, click here.
