Remember when President Donald Trump and co. made such a big deal about that “edited” Kamala Harris interview? On Sunday, the CBS program aired a new interview with Trump; the part that played on television was 23 minutes long, while an extended video posted online clocked in at 73 minutes. Then the newscast shared a full transcript of the 90-minute conversation on its website. As it turns out, 60 Minutes took Trump’s suggestion to edit out a clip where he gloated about the infamous Paramount settlement to save themselves from embarrassment. How kind!
Trump had been relitigating his elections, as he’s wont to do, insisting that Harris “wasn’t a very intelligent person.” This brought him to the fact that “actually 60 Minutes paid me a lotta money. And you don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you, and I’m sure you’re not—you have a great—I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great—from what I know. I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person.”
So, unsurprisingly, newly installed CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has the presidential seal of approval. Some would argue that’s exactly why Weiss was installed in the first place, so it certainly worked out for Paramount owner David Ellison. Ellison (whose father Larry Ellison is a Trump advisor) also got a shout-out in the interview, as the typically anti-press Trump said, “I see good things happening in the news. I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”
Many critics have suggested the exact opposite about Paramount, CBS News, and 60 Minutes, arguing that the network capitulated to pressure in order to curry favor with the administration. (Senator Elizabeth Warren has spearheaded an investigation into the matter.) Trump’s take on the situation is thus: “60 Minutes was forced to pay me—a lot of money because they took [Harris’] answer out that was so bad, it was election-changing, two nights before the election. And they put a new answer in.” (A full transcript of the Harris interview disproves this, and 60 Minutes has always stood by the fact that the segment was edited only for clarity and time constraints.) “And they paid me a lot of money for that,” Trump said. “You can’t have fake news. You’ve gotta have legit news. And I think that it’s happening.” You can watch the extended interview below, and check out the full transcript here.
