Donald Trump Tries To Command News Cycle With Lawsuit Against CBS Over Kamala Harris’ ‘60 Minutes’ Interview
In the waning days of the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump has sued CBS over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Amarillo, TX, seeks $10 billion in damages and is just the latest litigation that Trump has filed against a media entity that broadcasts or publishes content he doesn’t like.
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The lawsuit claims that the network violated Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which generally is aimed at false advertising.
Trump has been fixated on 60 Minutes and has threatened to sue CBS ever since it aired an interview with Harris as part of its election special on October 7. Trump initially agreed to sit down for an interview for the special, but then backed out, according to the network.
During the Harris interview, correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Harris about the situation in Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “not listening” to the administration.
In a promo for the 60 Minutes special that aired on Face the Nation, Harris answered, “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.”
In the 60 Minutes broadcast, Harris answered, “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
Trump claims that CBS intentionally sought to present Harris’ more succinct answer in the 60 Minutes broadcast to help her campaign.
“To paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness, CBS used its national platform on 60 Minutes to cross the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news,” the lawsuit claimed.
Trump has called Harris a “very low IQ person,” and the lawsuit is the latest attack, late in the campaign, on her syntax. The latest filing seems designed to drive home some of Trump’s attacks on Harris and the media. It includes some of his Truth Social posts following the 60 Minutes interview, including one in which he called Harris a “moron.” The lawsuit gets the dates of the Face the Nation and 60 Minutes broadcasts wrong by a day.
A number of times before, the former president has filed lawsuits against media outlets, seeking to call attention to what he considers media unfairness, only to have judges dismiss the complaints. They include Trump lawsuits against the New York Times and CNN.
CBS said in a statement that Trump’s “repeated claims against 60 Minutes are false. The interview was not doctored and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of Vice President Harris’ answer to the question at issue. 60 Minutes fairly presented the interview to inform the audience, and not to mislead it. The lawsuit Trump brought against CBS is completely without merit and we will vigorously defend against it.”
As Trump continued to blast the network, the show told viewers that Harris’ two different responses were all one answer to the same question.
In a statement, the show said, “Same question. Same answer. But a different portion of the response.” Networks routinely trim interviews to fit into a segment length. Fox News, for instance, trimmed part of Trump’s town hall with Harris Faulkner, removing portions that showed audience participants openly advocating for the former president’s election, CNN reported.
In a letter sent to Trump’s legal team earlier this month, CBS News SVP Gayle C. Sproul wrote that “60 Minutes did not hide any part of the Vice President’s answer to the question at issue.”
Sproul wrote in her letter to Trump’s attorneys, “It begs logic to argue that 60 Minutes hid the first part of the Vice President’s answer to the question. It did not. The public is aware of that part of her answer because 60 Minutes itself publicly distributed it by providing it to Face the Nation for promotional purposes and posting it on X and other 60 Minutes-branded social media for the same reason.” Sprout also declined to provide Trump’s team with a transcript of the interview.
Trump has continuously brought up the 60 Minutes interview at campaign rallies and other events, and he has called for the network to lose its FCC license over it, as he has other networks over their coverage.
After his latest attack, FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel spoke out against it, saying that his comments were “threats against free speech” that are “serious and should not be ignored.”
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