It’s been three months since the election, and there are still so many unanswered questions as to what exactly happened in the very obvious partnership that took place between the dying national news media and the Kamala Harris campaign. But a little more clarity was offered this week when Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, released the full nearly hour-long interview CBS “60 Minutes” aired with Harris several weeks before Election Day.
The disclosure of the raw footage came as CBS cooperated with a complaint to the FCC from the Center for American Rights, a right-leaning law firm that accused the network of news distortion. The allegation followed a discrepancy observers noted between the short tease that CBS released in advance of the full “60 Minutes” episode and the final cut that aired and showed Harris offering a different answer to the same question.
What we know now is that CBS’s original explanation for the issue, that it merely used a separate portion of a longer answer in the production that went to air, is true. But that doesn’t clear the network of its questionable decision to clean up not only that newsworthy portion of the interview, in which Harris’s fuller answer is hysterically confused, but in other parts, too.
Another highly suspect omission from the final cut was an extended portion in which Harris wasn’t asked some convoluted question on geopolitical matters or macro economics, but on why she wants to be president. “There are many reasons but probably, um, first and foremost, I truly believe in the promise of America,” she droned in an alarmingly slow cadence. “I do. And I love the American people. You know, we are a people who have ambition and aspirations and dreams and optimism and hope.”
Without even being able to see interviewer Bill Whitaker, you can feel his eyes mentally rolling to the back of his skull. The portion was surely nixed for its banality, but it’s a fundamental question the average voter would want an answer to, regardless of whether Harris has a deeply superficial, deeply boring answer.
In another portion, Whitaker asks another obvious one — what was Harris’s explanation for changing her position to the opposite of her previous stances on virtually every major issue.
Here’s what “60 Minutes” included from that answer:
“In the last four years I have been vice president of the United States and I have been traveling our country and I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people — geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds and what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing as long as you don’t compromise your values to find common sense solutions. And that has been my approach.”
But what “60 Minutes” ultimately aired was actually a spliced and diced mashup of two separate answers that Kamala offered, first to the direct question as to why her positions have changed and then to a follow up question about whether it was a matter of “evolution or, as your critics say, opportunism.”
The program did not air the more critical follow-up question and omitted most of what Harris said in response to the initial one, including a flippant remark wherein she said, “First of all, a lot of the positions that you’re talking about have been discussed and dispensed with in 2020, four years ago.”
Instead of including that bit, which suggests an admission by Harris that she had simply abandoned past policy positions without needing a reason (no biggie!), “60 Minutes” solely used the more positive portion about “building consensus.”
At the time of the initial controversy over the one editing discrepancy last year, CBS refused to release both the full transcript and footage of the interview, something it routinely did voluntarily with interviews otherwise. Of course not. The election wasn’t over yet, and the media was still engaged in a psychological operation against the voters in an attempt to convince them she was something she never was.