Raskin Presses CBS Ombudsman to Probe Editing of Trump's '60 Minutes' Interview
House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said Wednesday that he's demanding that CBS News Ombudsman Kenneth Weinstein investigate whether President Donald Trump improperly influenced and coerced the network’s editing of a 60 Minutes interview that aired in early November.
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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., suggested soon after the Trump interview that the FCC probe whether CBS’ editing of it constituted a violation of the commission’s news distortion rules (see 2511030048). Schumer sought to highlight the hypocrisy of the FCC's investigation of a Center for American Rights complaint about 60 Minutes' handling of an October 2024 interview with Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Kamala Harris (see 2410170051). Harris' campaign didn't seek edits to her interview, which was also the subject of a lawsuit from Trump that CBS settled in July (see 2507020053).
Trump “increasingly appears to be exercising direct control over CBS’s editorial decisions, destroying CBS’s ‘journalistic integrity’ while violating its right to be free from governmental coercion and manipulation,” Raskin said in a letter to Weinstein, who became CBS ombudsman in September (see 2509090065). “It is one thing for CBS to make independent editorial decisions protected by the First Amendment [and] quite another to make edits at the President’s demand out of fear of retribution.” Skydance agreed to create the ombudsman role in a bid to secure FCC approval of its $8 billion purchase of Paramount Global (see 2507240079). Weinstein is a former CEO of the Hudson Institute, a conservative policy think tank, and a former Trump adviser.
“The double standard here undermines public trust and demonstrates how Paramount’s capitulation has compromised CBS News’s independence,” Raskin told Weinstein. “The American people deserve to know whether their news is shaped by journalistic judgment or by” Trump. “This is your opportunity to silence your critics and prove that you will stand up for ‘journalistic integrity’ by conducting a thorough and transparent investigation into this new and stunning intrusion on editorial independence. In the old days, broadcast TV controlled its own editing process, but this time-honored free speech paradigm has been replaced by a governmental inside-monitor ‘Ombudsman.’”
Trump's 60 Minutes interview “revealed just how [the president] and his loyalists have hijacked CBS News’s journalistic integrity,” Raskin said. “CBS used to make independent editorial decisions protected by the First Amendment. Now CBS responds like Pavlov’s dog to make any substantive edits that the President demands. And the full transcript of the 60 Minutes interview reveals that President Trump told CBS to edit out his own comments -- and CBS promptly complied.”
A 28-minute cut of the Trump interview aired on 60 Minutes, but the full footage was an hour and 13 minutes. CBS posted both versions, as well as a full transcript, on its website. Trump, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and the Center for American Rights have said CBS’ use of different portions of a single answer from Harris in broadcasts of her 2024 interview constituted news distortion.
Raskin wrote that he wants Weinstein to provide him with an assessment by Dec. 17 of whether Trump’s request “to CBS to omit portions of his interview violates CBS News’s editorial independence standards.” Raskin also wants “all documents, communications, and editorial guidance provided to 60 Minutes producers regarding the Trump interview, including any input from Paramount executives, CBS corporate leadership, or outside parties.”
CBS and the White House didn’t immediately comment.