“CBS may be reaching a legal settlement with Trump because he didn’t like how a campaign interview with Kamala was edited. Really?” Sanders wrote on Twitter. “If CBS caves, the belief that we have an independent media protected by the First Amendment is undermined.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has urged CBS not to “cave” to President Donald Trump as the network considers settling an election interference lawsuit.
According to FOX News, President Trump filed the $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News in October. In his complaint, Trump claims that CBS News used deceptive editing techniques to aid former Vice President Kamala Harris in a “60 Minutes” interview.
The Wall Street Journal notes that CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, indicated that it may attempt to settle the lawsuit to facilitate a planned merger—a merger that will likely need to receive approval from the Trump administration.
On Friday, Sanders called on CBS to stand its ground.
“CBS may be reaching a legal settlement with Trump because he didn’t like how a campaign interview with Kamala was edited. Really?” Sanders wrote on Twitter. “If CBS caves, the belief that we have an independent media protected by the First Amendment is undermined.”
“CBS: stand tall,” Sanders wrote. “Support the Constitution.”
FOX News reports that the lawsuit relates to a brief exchange Harris had with “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whittaker. During the segment, Harris was asked why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not appear to be listening to U.S. directives on the Gaza conflict.
“Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or as a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” Harris replied.
Harris was purportedly mocked by some conservatives for her ambiguous answer.
However, when the segment aired the next night in a primetime election special, a shorter and more concise answer was edited in.
“We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris said in the edited primetime special.
President Trump quickly cast the alteration as an obvious attempt at election interference, asserting that CBS edited Harris’s response to avoid further “backlash.”
“To paper over Kamala’s ‘word salad’ weakness, CBS used its national platform on 60 Minutes to cross the line from the exercise of judgment in reporting to deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news,” Trump’s lawsuit alleges.
“CBS’ partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive, and mislead the public,” it says.
Paramount Global is continuing to engage in ongoing settlement negotiations with President Donald Trump.
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