‘Pathetic’: Media expert shreds ’60 Minutes’ response about ‘deceitful editing’ of Kamala interview

'It's blatantly unethical, and if someone on my staff did that, they'd be looking for a new job. I think they're hiding something, and they're afraid'

Oct 21, 2024 - 16:28
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‘Pathetic’: Media expert shreds ’60 Minutes’ response about ‘deceitful editing’ of Kamala interview

Howard Kurtz, the former Washington Post media writer who left CNN to join Fox News in 2013, is blasting “60 Minutes” as “blatantly unethical” for its “pathetic response” to allegations the network deceptively edited its recent interview with Kamala Harris to help the vice president sound better.

CBS News released a statement Sunday night, indicating: “Former President Donald Trump is accusing ’60 Minutes’ of deceitful editing of our Oct. 7 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That is false.”

“’60 Minutes’ gave an excerpt of our interview to ‘Face the Nation’ that used a longer section of her answer than that on 60 Minutes. Same question. Same answer. But a different portion of the response. When we edit any interview, whether a politician, an athlete, or movie star, we strive to be clear, accurate and on point. The portion of her answer on ’60 Minutes’ was more succinct, which allows time for other subjects in a wide ranging 21-minute-long segment.”

Appearing on Fox News Monday afternoon, Kurtz hammered the network’s claim.

“This is a pathetic response by ’60 Minutes’ after a week of silence,” Kurtz told Martha MacCallum.

“It basically says, ‘Yeah, we did it. So what?’ They talk about making Kamala Harris sound more succinct, in other words, making her look better by switching up the answers as you just saw. You can’t have a different part of an answer to the same question.”

“It’s blatantly unethical, and if someone on my staff did that, they’d be looking for a new job,” he continued.

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“The simplest thing would be to post a transcript. And if they thought this would exonerate them, they would post the transcript. I think they’re hiding something, and they’re afraid to do that.”

MacCallum noted: “I think you’re right about that because so often ’60 Minutes’ will say go to ’60 Minutes Extra’ and you can see the entire thing, but they didn’t do that.”

“Absolutely not and they’re refusing to do it,” Kurtz replied, “and it’s impossible to imagine that if it helped their case we wouldn’t have seen this transcript days ago.”

MacCallum wondered: “And one of the issues with the vice president and the way she speaks is what people refer to as ‘word salad.’ So by extracting that part, you are also taking away from some of the editorial interest in her response, no?”

Kurtz answered: “Yeah. I mean I’m almost speechless because ’60 Minutes,’ you know, 50 years was sort of the gold standard of news-magazine reporting, and they’ve really created this mess for themselves, and this statement doesn’t make it any better.”

“When I talked to former President Trump over the weekend, he says, you know, he wants CBS off the air, he wants to yank the license. I don’t necessarily agree with that. You’d be making an awful lot of people pay a price with nothing to do with ’60 Minutes.’ But at the same time, CBS’ damage control here is just making it more damaging.”

The Trump War Room says there’s “a simple way” to clear up the matter, and that is to “release the full, unedited transcript” of Bill Whitaker’s interview with Harris.

Trump himself has hammered CBS for its deceptive editing, calling it “the single greatest scandal, in my opinion, in broadcast history.”

“’60 Minutes’ and CBS interviewed Kamala, and she’s incompetent. She gave them the dumbest answer anyone’s ever heard. So they took that answer out, the whole answer they threw out, and they took another answer that she gave to a totally different question and inserted it. And supposedly, they did this a number of times. And they got caught. ’60 Minutes’ and CBS should lose their license for that.”

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CBS named in federal complaint over its decision to make Harris look coherent

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WATCH: ’60 Minutes’ uses deceptive editing to make Kamala Harris look coherent

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Fibis I am just an average American. My teen years were in the late 70s and I participated in all that that decade offered. Started working young, too young. Then I joined the Army before I graduated High School. I spent 25 years in, mostly in Infantry units. Since then I've worked in information technology positions all at small family owned companies. At this rate I'll never be a tech millionaire. When I was young I rode horses as much as I could. I do believe I should have been a cowboy. I'm getting in the saddle again by taking riding lessons and see where it goes.