WASHINGTON — Continuing his battle against corporate media outlets he views as his political foes, President Donald Trump early on Thursday morning called for CBS to lose its license to broadcast and the long-running “60 Minutes” news program to be “immediately terminated” over an interview it conducted with Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s campaign.
The comments come as Trump is suing the network for $10 billion in his personal capacity and as his newly selected Federal Communications Commission chair has launched a probe of CBS and other outlets for allegedly biased coverage of the president. CBS’ parent company, Paramount, is reportedly exploring settlement options with the president as it seeks a merger with the entertainment company Skydance.
Trump claimed CBS deceptively edited the October interview with Harris to present her in a better light, labeling the standard practice of news networks editing interviews for time and clarity “Election Interference and, quite simply, Election Fraud at a level never seen before.” CBS denies the “60 Minutes” broadcast was “doctored or deceitful” and on Wednesday released the complete transcripts of the interviews with Harris used for that broadcast in response to an FCC request.
“CBS and 60 Minutes defrauded the public by doing something which has never, to this extent, been seen before,” Trump wrote in a post to his Truth Social network at 6:09 a.m. EST on Thursday. “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.”
“The question must [be] asked, was CBS paid for committing this FRAUD??? Many other questions to come! This will go down as the biggest Broadcasting SCANDAL in History!!!” Trump added.
Trump claims CBS deceptively edited the broadcast to give Harris a better answer to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s relationship with the Biden administration. But CBS argued the different edits of the interview — a shorter version on “60 Minutes” versus a longer version on their Sunday morning show “Face the Nation” — each accurately reflected “the substance of the vice president's answer.”
“As the full transcript shows, we edited the interview to ensure that as much of the vice president's answers to 60 Minutes' many questions were included in our original broadcast while fairly representing those answers,” CBS said in a statement Wednesday. “60 Minutes' hard-hitting questions of the vice president speak for themselves.”
CBS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s threats on Thursday.
In a statement Wednesday, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Biden administration appointee, called the FCC’s probe into CBS over the interview a “fishing expedition” and said after reading the transcripts she sees “no reason to continue pursuing this investigation.” She described FCC chair Brendan Carr’s actions as “unprecedented and reckless.”
In his post on Thursday morning, Trump also pointed to the “scandal” about Politico and other media outlets being paid by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been effectively gutted by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team. Like many of the claims Musk, Trump and others have made about the federal foreign aid agency, Trump’s assertion Thursday was misleading and lacked context.
Trump claimed Politico received $8 million from USAID. The actual total was $44,000, according to The Dispatch, which also verified that the money was for subscriptions to Politico’s energy and environment industry publication. Many federal agencies subscribe to Politico industry publications, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
In a statement, Politico said as a privately owned company, they have "never received any government funding."
Politico's subscription services are "used by companies, organizations, and, yes, some government agencies. They subscribe because it makes them better at their jobs—helping them track policy, legislation, and regulations in real-time with news, intelligence, and a suite of data products," the company's CEO, Goli Sheikholeslami, and global editor-in-chief, John Harris, said. "Government agencies that subscribe do so through standard public procurement processes—just like any other tool they buy to work smarter and be more efficient. This is not funding. It is a transaction."
Carr, the FCC chair, has relaunched probes into NBC and ABC over alleged bias against Trump, including for ABC’s fact-checking of Trump during a presidential debate and NBC putting Harris on an episode of "Saturday Night Live." Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, had dismissed the complaints last month before her departure.
Carr has also launched new investigations into NPR and PBS, arguing the public broadcasters’ public funding should be cut off. NPR receives about 1% of its funding from the federal government each year, and PBS receives about 16%, according to NPR.
Trump has frequently called for broadcast news channels like CBS, which continue to air on frequencies regulated by the federal government, to have their licenses revoked. While the FCC is nominally intended to operate independent of the White House, Carr has so far in his tenure implemented the president’s wishes to launch investigations and punish media targets.
