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With Vice President Kamala Harris’s blundering interview with Fox News on full display, CBS News’ apparent decision to selectively edit its own interview to be more flattering of the presidential hopeful looks even more damning.
Harris has only done a handful of interviews as the Democrat replacement nominee for president, and all but the one with Fox News anchor Bret Baier have been done with media allies of Harris and her ideological ilk. A lot of them have been pretaped, giving outlets the ability to edit the footage.
Last week, CBS put on one of the most blatant attempts to deceive the American people by releasing one, and then a second totally different, answer to the same question. In the first version, Harris shared what has been widely mocked as a lengthy “word salad” answer to “60 Minutes” interviewer Bill Whitaker’s question about Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strained relationship with the White House.
The “word salad,” however, did not make it into the edit that aired in the full interview, as it was replaced by a shorter, more succinct answer that did not appear in the first clip. The switcheroo, which appeared to be nothing less than corporate media election interference, earned scorn and even a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) complaint accusing CBS of “significant and intentional news distortion.”
“This isn’t just about one interview or one network,” Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, which filed the complaint, said in a statement. “This is about the public’s trust in the media on critical issues of national security and international relations during one of the most consequential elections of our time.”
“When broadcasters manipulate interviews and distort reality, it undermines democracy itself. The FCC must act swiftly to restore public confidence in our news media,” Suhr added.
CBS and the FCC’s Democrat chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel defended the selective editing, with “60 Minutes” correspondent Jon Wertheim saying that “things are edited in every story.” Rosenworcel came more forcefully to the defense of CBS, attacking former President Donald Trump’s criticism of the edits, saying, “While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored.”
The vast majority of Americans (85 percent) believe CBS should release the full interview, according to a Harvard/Harris poll.
A little more than a week after Harris’s CBS interview, her Fox News interview on Wednesday showed the American people exactly what kind of performance the CBS editors were apparently trying to hide. She was combative and angry at receiving pushback from the press, as the interview showed an unadulterated display of her inability to articulate her own positions, much less how they differ from the policies of the disastrous Biden administration.
Baier asked Harris normal, journalistic questions and Fox published the interview in its entirety. That did not stop the Harris campaign from quickly blasting it as an “ambush,” in the words of Harris senior adviser and former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.
On countless occasions in the Fox interview, Harris appeared irritated that she was being asked basic questions about the administration in which she currently serves and about her changing policy positions. She also refused to answer the questions, invoking Trump at each opportunity to the point where Baier was forced to try to re-focus Harris on answering the actual questions posed.
One of the several issues Baier asked about that Harris has flip-flopped on was her position supporting decriminalizing illegal border crossings, which she expressed during her 2019 run for president. She now says she does not support that and “will not do that as president,” despite the fact that with her as “border czar” the Biden administration has allowed an unprecedented surge of illegal border crossings.
When asked about the repercussions of her administration’s open border policy, like the deaths of innocent Americans at the hands of illegals dumped by the Biden-Harris administration into American communities, Harris offered a mealy-mouthed and dismissive apology. Instead of taking responsibility, she merely said she was sorry that the deaths occurred.
Harris invoked a bill killed in Congress in an attempt to shift blame to Republicans for not passing immigration reform, but, as Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida pointed out, the bill would have allowed nearly two million illegal aliens into the country every year and codified leftist policies by funding sanctuary cities, lawyers for the illegals, NGOs involved in transporting them, and would not have deported them, among many other things.
When Harris repeatedly tried to claim that Trump is “not stable,” Baier turned the premise on its head, asking Harris an extremely obvious question: when did she “first notice that President Biden’s mental faculties appeared diminished?”
Harris deflected, exasperated, telling Baier that Biden, who is still serving as president, “is not on the ballot.”
Of the few interviews Harris has done, her sit-down with Fox has been the only one with an interviewer who is not a dyed-in-the-wool ally of the far left. And it showed, as Harris angrily sputtered under mildly challenging questions.
In response, the leftist media outlets that have worked overtime to cover for Harris’ shortcomings rushed to paint the Fox interview as something outside media norms.
Miraculously, many corporate media outlets — the Associated Press, NPR, CNN, the Guardian, and more — came out with matching headlines to help pad the Harris campaign’s disastrous showing, using the word “testy” to describe the Fox interview.
CNN’s Brian Stelter went further, saying Harris “walked into a Trump campaign field office” at Fox and describing Baier as a “Trump surrogate” in an attempt to explain away Harris’ incoherence.
Stelter boasted on social media that the Harris campaign agrees with him.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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