For ’60 Minutes,’ it’s Democrat Party time

It appears that “60 Minutes” again has been caught in a blatant act of creative editing for political purposes, this time in an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

The popular Sunday program on CBS regularly does camera cuts that show questions and answers that may not necessarily match up but make for “gotcha” TV.

But once in a while, they do something so transparently partisan that it ignites pushback.

Twenty years ago, Dan Rather helmed a famous segment on the show two months before the 2004 presidential election. The former “CBS Evening News” anchor claimed that President George W. Bush had gone AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s and had received special treatment.

Mr. Bush, who was running for reelection against Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat, denied the allegations. After the network was unable to verify the damning document, Mr. Rather and several other staffers were shown the door. Mr. Bush went on to win his second term.

On Oct. 6, four weeks before the 2024 election, “60 Minutes” featured a one-on-one interview of Ms. Harris by Bill Whitaker. The editors went beyond the usual media airbrushing.

They not only cleaned up Ms. Harris’ rambling sentences but actually rearranged statements by both Mr. Whitaker and Ms. Harris for effect.

How do we know this? Because unedited portions became available. During an earlier broadcast of CBS’ “Face the Nation,” a two-minute teaser segment aired that was not featured on “60 Minutes.” That segment was replaced by two minutes of differently edited tape.

Someone had cut out a large portion in which Ms. Harris explained why Israel had a right to defend itself against its enemies – Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah.

Instead, the edited version on “60 Minutes” leaves out Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran and emphasizes the administration’s tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war in Gaza.

If you want a full comparison, check out the Versus Media podcast with Stephen L. Miller, who painstakingly breaks it down by running unedited clips alongside what appeared on “60 Minutes.”

Why did “60 Minutes” do this? Democrats are concerned about Muslim voter turnout in Michigan, a key swing state, and Minnesota, where there are large Islamic communities. Someone at “60 Minutes” could have been protecting the Democrat nominee’s Muslim flank.

A less savory reason might be the growing anti-Semitism creeping into America’s political left, including the legacy media like CBS.

Mr. Miller acknowledges that he is no fan of Ms. Harris. But he says he found her clear statement about Israel and its enemies compelling. He concludes that CBS is harboring anti-Israel sentiment.

According to the New York Post, CBS News’ senior director of standards emailed all CBS News employees in late August with a list of problematic terms, saying of Jerusalem, “Do not refer to it as being in Israel.”

Former President Donald Trump and others are calling on CBS to release the original, unedited transcript of the Harris interview. Sounds fair to me. Let’s see what they had to work with.

Editing to make something clearer is not nefarious. In fact, it’s journalism 101. Editing to distort for political purposes is something else entirely.

In tapings, liberals benefit from protective editing by like-minded journalists. Conservatives, in most cases, fare much better in live interviews, where statements can’t be taken out of context by the reflexively hostile media.

Bias can take the form of bad lighting, weird camera angles and “gotcha” questions, plus edits so dishonest that they reverse the meaning of what a person says. Often, the final product will omit a conservative’s most compelling and persuasive statements.

In a study released just before the vice-presidential debate, the Media Research Center reviewed more than 340 hours of coverage in 161 stories on “The CBS Evening News” and its Saturday/Sunday twin, “The CBS Weekend News,” from July 21 to Sept. 27.

They found that coverage of Ms. Harris was 84% positive, contrasted with coverage of Mr. Trump, which was 79% negative.

The same held for the vice-presidential candidates, with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, getting 89% positive coverage and Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Republican, getting 89% negative coverage.

During the vice-presidential debate on CBS on Oct. 1, Mr. Vance was confronted with hostile queries, mini editorials and even a fake fact check by the CBS moderators, Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell.

But he didn’t let it rattle him, and he pointed out why the “fact check” itself was bogus. They turned off his mike, but they couldn’t edit out the exchange because it was live TV.

As Elon Musk has shown by purchasing Twitter and converting it into the free speech platform X, more speech is the best answer to lies and censorship.

This column was first published at the Washington Times.