The Media Research Center has championed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against CBS for allegedly making Kamala Harris look too good in a “60 Minutes” interview — as one would expect from an organization dedicated to smearing and trashing any media that’s not sufficiently right-wing — and is in denial about the fact that the full video of the interview showed only standard video editing, not deliberate bias. The MRC is clinging to that narrative, and Nicholas Fondacaro gushed that the lawsuit got its “first scalp” through the resignation of a “60 Minutes” producer in an April 22 post:
President Trump’s $20 billion defamation lawsuit against CBS News and 60 Minutes appears to have claimed its first scalp on Tuesday, with executive producer Bill Owens announcing his departure from the company via a memo to staff. The news outlet has been under pressure from its parent company Paramount Global to settle the election-related suit.
“The fact is that 60 Minutes has been my life,” Owens opined. “My 60 Minutes priorities have always been clear. Maybe not smart, but clear.”
Hinting at pressure from above, Owens huffed that it appeared as though he would not be allowed to run 60 Minutes under their typical business-as-usual approach:
[…]It became more obvious that the pressure on Owens extended from outside CBS News directly because he praised the network’s president and CEO. “Wendy McMahon has always had our back, and she agrees that 60 Minutes needs to be run by a 60 Minute producer,” he touted.
Fondacaro made sure to get in his pro-Trump, anti-CBS narrative:
60 Minutes came under pressure following the election-related defamation against the network. Trump accused the network of “deceitful editing” of their interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, arguing that it was done to help her campaign by making her look better.
NewsBusters later confirmed that the portion of the interview in question was highly edited, after the Federal Communications Commission published the unedited footage themselves. CBS News refused to share the unedited video with the public.
As we pointed out, Fondacaro and NewsBusters did not “confirm” that — actual, nonbiased media observers said the video shows normal video editing. Fondacaro did at least acknowledge the apparent ulterior motive for Paramount pushing to settle the lawsuit despite the facts being on CBS’ side: “CBS’s parent company Paramount Global was pushing for a settlement with Trump since the administration had to sign off on their merger with Skydance.”
Curtis Houck lashed out in a May 19 post after the resignation of a CBS News executive, headlined “She Is Not A Martyr”:
As reported by The New York Times and other fellow liberal media apologists, CBS News president Wendy McMahon announced Monday she quit as a sign of dismay and disgust with the network overlords moving toward a settlement with now-President Trump for 60 Minutes’s hatchet job of an October 2020 interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
[…]Trump sued CBS back on November 1, 2024 for what’s now $20 billion once it was revealed the network edited out one of Harris’s classic word salads while speaking to correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Middle East.
Since then, Paramount have seen fit to work towards a settlement with the now-President at the same time it’s angling for a sale to the media company, SkyDance (owned by David Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison) and have that sale approved by the Trump administration.
Earlier this year, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr declared he too was interested in investigating CBS’s conduct vis-à-vis their pre-election special given a broadcast network’s broader requirements to serve the public good versus, say, a cable channel.
After noting alleged concerns at Paramount about how McMahon did her job, Houck exclaimed, “Oh, there it is! Job performance (or lack thereof),” adding: “So, when you’re a biased executive who’s donated over $6,000 to the Biden campaign (as per our friend Reagan Reese at the Daily Caller) and a poor performance record, don’t mind us if we don’t feel bad for her.”
Note Houck’s making a point of “a broadcast network’s broader requirements to serve the public good versus, say, a cable channel” — which tells us that neither Houck nor the FCC will hold, say, Fox News to those same standards, despite bias being much more rampant there than at CBS, and that the FCC’s targeting of CBS in this case is all about lawfare, which we were told right-wingers opposed.