CBS News has agreed to comply with the Federal Communications Commission’s request for the unedited transcript and tape of Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview that aired on Oct. 7, 2024, following a lawsuit against the network brought by Donald Trump.
Trump’s FCC appointee, Brendan Carr, led the commission’s inquisition by sending the network’s news division a letter on Wednesday evening, requesting “the full, unedited transcript and camera feeds.”
“We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do,” the network’s spokesman said on Friday, The New York Times reported.
Trump sued CBS for $10 billion last year, accusing the network of intentionally crafting the interview in favor of Harris and her candidacy through edits. He alleges that the network targeted him by including longer segments of her response to a question about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
While media law experts dismissed the litigation as a thinly veiled punishment for the news outlet, CBS’s parent company Paramount has begun settlement discussions with Trump’s representatives.
Some believe that the parent company is in a rush to settle so it can clear the path for the FCC to approve its multibillion-dollar merger with Skydance Media. It is worth mentioning that the latter is owned by Trump ally and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s son, David Ellison.
The Letter of Inquiry has drawn criticism from media experts such as Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez, who slammed the request as a “retaliatory move by the government against broadcasters whose content or coverage is perceived to be unfavorable,” adding, “It is designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.”
Read it at The New York Times
