FCC demands CBS News turn over ’60 Minutes’ interview amid Trump lawsuit

CBS and its “60 Minutes” have long stood as shining beacons of broadcast news.

The Sunday night newsmagazine, with its ubiquitous ticking clock, earned a reputation for not backing down from a fight. For a half-century, the show established the standard for TV investigative reporting with its no-holds-barred questioning of U.S. presidents and others in power.

But a different clock is ticking.

President Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, this week demanded CBS turn over the full, unedited transcript of its “60 Minutes” interview in October with former Vice President Kamala Harris, including film footage from the different camera angles.

That interview provoked the ire of Trump, who filed a lawsuit against CBS alleging the network was engaged in deceptive editing practices.

“We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do,” Paramount Global-owned CBS said Friday in a statement.

The latest development comes as Paramount Global lawyers engage in preliminary talks to settle the lawsuit Trump filed last year over the “60 Minutes” interview. Trump alleged the network “deceptively” edited the interview to present Harris more favorably in the closing weeks of the election.

Lawyers for Trump on Friday asked a Texas judge to extend a key deadline in the court case. Paramount’s lawyers went along with the request, which could give the two sides additional time to try to hammer out a truce.

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The FCC inquiry raises the stakes in the dispute, which has stoked fears that Trump and his team are using levers of power to chill unflattering news coverage. Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has been agitating for her team to settle Trump’s lawsuit to facilitate her family’s sale of Paramount to David Ellison’s Skydance Media, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment.

Paramount needs FCC approval for the Skydance deal to advance. The agency’s signoff is required for the transfer of CBS television licenses to the Ellison family.

The company’s seeming willingness to placate Trump has roiled journalists, including within CBS News. First Amendment experts initially interpreted Trump’s “60 Minutes” lawsuit, which seeks $10 billion in damages, as a political stunt. They said settling the case with Trump would deliver a crushing blow to CBS News’ legacy.

“This is an act of pure cowardice for short-term gain that corrupts every journalistic value imaginable,” said USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism professor Gabriel Kahn.

“It is a sad day,” 1st Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams wrote Friday in an email to The Times. “It’s heart-breaking that CBS —say it again, CBS — seems ready to pay big bucks for its own editing decisions.”

The storied news division has maintained “60 Minutes” as the gold standard in television journalism for more than five decades. People inside the company, who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said they fear the move will not only tarnish the “60 Minutes” brand but also set a dangerous precedent that could weaken journalism institutions.

“You think in the next four years we’re not going to say something that’s going to get him riled up again and he’ll do this again?” said one veteran journalist in the division.

Trump filed the lawsuit on Oct. 31, accusing CBS of “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive and substantial news distortion calculated to ... tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party,” according to his complaint.

He filed the lawsuit in Texas, ensuring that one of his judicial appointees would oversee the case.

In court filings last month, CBS attorneys argued that the Texas venue was not proper. Trump was a resident of Florida when the lawsuit was filed. Some legal experts dismissed the maneuver as “judge shopping.” CBS attorneys argued in court filings that the case should be dismissed or moved to New York, where CBS is based.

The “60 Minutes” broadcast was edited in New York, and the segment did not pertain to Texas or even Trump, the CBS lawyers wrote. Trump’s attorneys on Friday asked for a week-long extension to file their response.

“60 Minutes” producers denied Trump’s allegations that they doctored one of Harris’ answers to remove her more wordy response to a question. Harris was responding to a question from CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Gaza war.

Conservatives quickly seized on an apparent discrepancy in Harris’ remarks after CBS ran an excerpt of the interview during its public affairs show “Face the Nation,” which included Harris’ longer answer.

The following day, a special edition of “60 Minutes” aired with more of the Harris interview. That program used a different, and much shorter, part of Harris’ response.

Anger over a possible settlement runs so deep that CBS News could experience an exodus of journalists and even executives if the company caves, some said.

“This is essentially a crack in the foundations of our free press,” Kahn said.

George Cheeks, co-chief executive of Paramount Global, has been made aware of the news division’s concerns over how a settlement would be perceived in the industry and its broader impact on press freedom. Paramount Global board members also have received pleas from inside the news division to fight the Trump lawsuit, sources said.

Cheeks spent months trying to navigate choppy waters amid Redstone’s increasing unhappiness with CBS News and “60 Minutes” over its coverage of the war in Gaza.

Redstone has not publicly opined on the settlement talks. A Redstone spokesperson declined to comment.

The Redstone family is in the process of unwinding its Paramount holdings by selling its investment vehicle to the Ellison family for more than $2 billion. The Skydance transaction would see the fractious Redstone family exiting Hollywood after four decades.

Shari Redstone has focused her philanthropic work on fighting antisemitism. She publicly backed CBS anchor Tony Dukoupil after the morning show co-host was called out by his bosses over an aggressive interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose most recent book compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank to the Jim Crow era of segregation in the U.S.

Redstone also was unhappy over a recent “60 Minutes” story about dissent in the State Department over the Biden administration’s handling of the war, according to two knowledgeable sources. After the segment aired, Cheeks named former CBS president and veteran producer Susan Zirinsky as standards editor to oversee “highly complex, sensitive issues like the war in the Middle East,” according to a memo.

People close to the lawsuit describe the settlement talks in the Trump lawsuit as preliminary. Some executives privately suggested that settling the lawsuit was the price of doing business in Trump’s second administration. These people viewed a settlement as an efficient means to keep CBS out of court and expedite the completion of the Skydance deal.

Paramount and Skydance Media also declined to comment.

Carr’s FCC inquiry comes after his agency last week revived a complaint filed by the Center for American Rights, which also took issue with CBS producers’ edits of the Harris interview.

“There is a line between editorial discretion, which is protected, and news distortion or news manipulation, which is not,” Daniel Suhr, president of the nonprofit group, said in an interview earlier this week.

“When there are serious concerns raised, typically, the regulator investigates and resolves it based on what the investigation finds,” Suhr said. “That’s what we are hoping for here.”

FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, a Democrat, objected to the agency’s move.

“This is a retaliatory move by the government against broadcasters whose content or coverage is perceived to be unfavorable,” Gomez said in a statement. “It is designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.”

CBS News executives had discussed releasing a full transcript of the Harris interview before the FCC inquiry. But they saw that as a dangerous precedent because raw transcripts of edited interviews are typically released to address issues related to possible defamation. Trump’s lawsuit is not a defamation case.

“If I were CBS, I would not settle it,” said Jeff McCall, media studies professor at DePauw University. “I would fight it and just go totally down the path that this is editorial discretion. The free press has every right to make judgments as it sees fit, including if they want to take sides in an election.”