The scandal engulfing CBS’ 60 Minutes over its edited interview with Kamala Harris has turbocharged fears that the Democrat is being shepherded into the White House by a liberal media increasingly desperate to cover for her shortcomings.
The presidential race has been dogged by allegations of media bias since the moment Harris unseated Joe Biden as the Democrat pick in the wake of his disastrous debate with Donald Trump in June.
Apart from glowing magazine profiles and softball interviews with handpicked reporters, the VP has largely side-stepped the media exposure that candidates traditionally allow.
But the CBS debacle has crystalized fears that a supine media is conspiring with her evasion in its determination not to allow what happened to Biden, to happen to her.
‘She is almost completely unable to speak unprompted without a teleprompter,’ Fox News’ Sean Hannity said at the weekend. ‘And now the state-run media are trying their best to rescue a campaign that is beginning to spiral downwards.’
Kamala Harris was among friends as she appeared on ABC’s The View where she was interviewed by Ana Navarro, who appeared on stage at the DNC
Cheers! Harris found a CBS drinking buddy in Stephen Colbert on The Late Show
It was July 24 that Harris announced her candidacy to succeed her boss in the White House but more than a month before she granted her first sit-down interview, choosing CNN for a half-hour chat and bringing along her VP pick Tim Walz for support.
Bash, a CNN loyalist who has worked at the liberal network since graduating from college, was accused of failing to land any major blows.
Vogue Magazine hailed her as the ‘candidate for our times’ in a fawning profile
Daily Mail columnist Andrew Neil said Harris was ‘let off the hook on her part in the cover up of Biden’s cognitive decline’ and added that CNN gave a ‘master class on how not to hold politicians to account’.
GOP polling guru Frank Luntz tweeted: ‘A lot of people think Kamala Harris has done well so far in this interview. I disagree – a good debater will find it easy to challenge her.’
The warning was heeded by ABC as the presidential debate against Donald Trump approached on September 10.
An affidavit citing a whistleblower claims that the hosting network provided questions to Harris ahead of the debate on September 10 and agreed to a series of preconditions.
The document, said to be a sworn affidavit signed by a notary public the day before the debate, says the network gave Harris questions ahead of time while agreeing to a series of other preconditions to give the vice president an advantage over Trump.
Harris answered questions on Alex Cooper’s sex-centric podcast ‘Call Her Daddy’
Harris’s husband Doug has been accused of smacking an ex-girlfriend in the face so hard that she spun around but no-one has challenged the pair about the issue
Comedian Howard Stern told her ‘You’ve gotta win’ after she agreed to an interview
Prohibited at the debate were inquiries about Harris’ stint as California Attorney General, as well as any questions involving her brother-in-law, Tony West, according to claims made in the document.
ABC denied the claims but viewers could see for themselves that moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir fact-checked Trump five times and did not correct Harris once.
Muir slapped down Trump’s claim that crime has risen during the Biden-Harris administration, declaring: ‘As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.’
A check of Justice Department figures later revealed that violent crime jumped 37 percent from 2020 to 2023, rape increased 42 percent, and robbery by 63 percent.
The pair were happy for Harris to deny ever supporting transgender operations for undocumented migrants, before it emerged that she had boasted to the ACLU of actually helping one take place.
Even the New York Times later confirmed that the ‘wildest sounding attack line’ from Trump was ‘basically true’.
Ordeal over, Harris could sit back and bask in the adulation from a media celebrating her rise as the first black woman to secure the Democrats’ nomination.
The former California Attorney General was embraced as an icon for glossy magazines, beaming out from the newsstands on the covers of Vogue, the New Yorker and Time.
And her boutique approach to granting interviews saw her pick influencers over reporters as she eschewed hostile scrutiny.
The former California Attorney General was embraced as an icon for glossy magazines, beaming out from the newsstands on the covers of Vogue, the New Yorker and Time
CBS News is facing immense backlash after the network edited a ‘word salad’ answer from Harris in her 60 Minutes interview in order to allegedly portray her more positively
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CBS accused of editing out Kamala Harris' 'word salad' response to 60 Minutes question on Israel
‘I’m really nervous,’ comedian and podcaster Howard Stern told her as they sat down for his SiriusXM show, ‘because I want this to go well for you.’
‘Even when I watch ‘Saturday Night Live’, where they have Maya Rudolph playing you, I hate it. I don’t want you being made fun of.
‘You’ve gotta win,’ he demanded. ‘You just have to… Like, the sun’s eternally gonna go out.’
The tame interviews continued on Sunday, with an appearance on Alex Cooper’s sex-centric podcast ‘Call Her Daddy’ where the host allowed the vice president to repeat her typical talking points on abortion rights and student debt.
‘I’m so disappointed, this feels like propaganda and trying to make her look ‘gen z’,’ wrote one listener. ‘You’re gonna look back on this one day and regret it when we are in a war because of her.’
But Harris did brave the TV studios for an appearance on ABC’s The View with Ana Navarro, who appeared on stage at the DNC.
Flanked by Sunny Hostin and Whoopi Goldberg the presenters did their best to lob her tame questions, but even those seemed to floor her, including one about how her presidency would differ from that of Joe Biden’s.
‘We’re obviously two different people,’ she countered before conceding: ‘There is not a thing that comes to mind.’
Having put those interviewers to the sword she felt relaxed enough to cut loose on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show where she chugged beers with the host as she laid out her vision to the CBS viewers.
‘Were I to be elected president, it is about, frankly, um, I — I love the American people and I believe in our country,’ she revealed.
‘I love that it is our character and nature to be an ambitious people. You know, we have aspirations, dreams.
‘We are, we — we have incredible work ethic, and — and I just believe that we can create, and, and build upon the success that we’ve achieved in a way that we continue to grow opportunity and in that way grow the strength of our nation.’
The networks’ nerves about the Harris campaign extend to her VP pick Tim Walz who saw CBS cut the mike of his opponent JD Vance during their vice presidential debate.
And no-one granted access to Harris and Doug Emhoff has seen fit to challenged either on DailyMail.com’s reporting that the VP’s husband punched a former girlfriend in the head.
On MSNBC — a network one staffer recently admitted is nothing but an arm of Kamala’s campaign — Joe Scarborough, host of ‘Morning Joe’, asked Emhoff whether he was ‘p***ed off’ with ‘tabloid stories about (his) personal life’.
Emhoff did not deny that he had struck his ex-girlfriend. Nor did Scarborough push him for an answer.
‘It’s all a distraction,’ Emhoff opined. ‘It’s designed to get us off our game.’
But nerves are fraying as the campaign ticks down to its final days and renegade staffers are increasingly blowing the whistle on a media industry which seems determined to carry Harris to the White House.
Trump has accused CBS of ‘election interference’ as the debacle over her interview with Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes continues to unfold.
The host asked her whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was listening to the US and whether the administration had any sway over Israel’s decision making in its conflict with Hamas in Gaza.
The network broadcast a teaser clip of her response that ran on Sunday’s Face the Nation and was uploaded to YouTube.
‘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 a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,’ she replied.
But when the interview itself was broadcast on Monday, viewers were shown a more intelligible response.
‘We’re not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,’ she appeared to succinctly declare.
CBS News cut the mikes as moderators’ Norah O’Donnell (left) and Margaret Brennan (right) tried to shut down JD Vance during the vice-presidential debate
The official CBS News standards guide insists that ‘answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response’.
‘We cannot create an answer merely because we wish the subject had said it better,’ it adds.
The suspicion is that the network did just that yet it has refused requests to release the interview transcript.
Former CBS journalist Catherine Herridge was among those pointing out that the network happily issued the transcript of her 2020 sit-down with Donald Trump, tweeting that transcripts are ‘about transparency and standing behind the integrity of the final edit’.
As pressure grows the former president has voiced what he believes many viewers themselves now think about the media coverage of their presidential race.
’60 Minutes is a major part of the News Organization of CBS, which has just created the Greatest Fraud in Broadcast History,’ he tweeted.
‘CBS should lose its license, and it should be bid out to the Highest Bidder, as should all other Broadcast Licenses because they are just as corrupt as CBS—and maybe even WORSE!’