"CBS is no good. In fact, in honor of you, I just sued CBS today, because of ‘60 Minutes,’" Former President Donald Trump announced to his audience at a Nevada campaign rally Thursday, addressing the network’s dishonest portrayal of Democrat Candidate Kamala Harris’ answer to a question.
The lawsuit accuses CBS of violating a legal prohibition against “[f]alse, misleading, or deceptive acts or practices in the conduct of any trade or commerce.” Through its actions, CBS committed an act of election interference, the lawsuit says:
“CBS’s partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to (a) confuse, deceive, and mislead the public, and (b) attempt to tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party.”
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“CBS and its 60 Minutes producers intentionally misled the public by broadcasting and posting a carefully, deceptively edited Interview and transcript while opting to release other portions online. Such manipulative editing aimed to confuse the electorate regarding Kamala’s lack of abilities, intelligence, and appeal.”
CBS illegally distorted the news by airing an answer to a question that wasn’t Harris’ – but was actually CBS’s, the lawsuit charges:
“CBS further misled and deceived President Trump and millions of people in Texas and this District—and violated the broadcast distortion policy—because the source of Kamala’s edited answer in the Interview was not, in fact, Kamala, but CBS taking its editorial pen to confuse viewers as to what she said.”
The lawsuit seeks two remedies from the court:
- Compensatory damages of $10 billion from CBS.
- An order enjoining CBS’s ongoing false, misleading, and deceptive acts
CBS has adamantly refused to release the full transcript of its interview with Harris at issue. The lawsuit cites a FCC complaint filed against CBS which, as CNSNews reported last month, seeks the transcript’s release to the public:
“CBS’s duplicitous editing and airing of its recent interview with Vice President and Democrat Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris has prompted a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) complaint.
“On October 16, the Center for American Rights, a public interest law firm, filed a complaint urging the FCC to compel CBS to release the full transcript of its recent interview with Vice President and Democrat Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris.”
On Thursday, Media Research Center President and Founder Brent Bozell called on CBS to release the full transcript - and to tell the public whether or not it coordinated with Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign when it edited her 60 Minutes interview.
“CBS needs to confirm whether anyone at your organization directly communicated with the Harris campaign after the interview regarding potential edits,“ Bozell wrote in a letter to CBS leadership:
“If there were such communications, CBS must work to regain the public’s trust and release all records regarding these communications, including emails, phone transcripts, video recordings and personal notes.”
The controversy first erupted when CBS changed Harris’s answer to a question it aired, as NewsBusters explained in an October 9 report:
“Brian Flood and David Rutz at FoxNews.com reported that CBS aired two different answers to the same question on Israel in its 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. First they aired a word-salad answer on Sunday’s Face the Nation. But when the interview aired on Monday night, the answer was entirely different.”
CBS’s conflicting portrayals of Harris’s answer have raised widespread suspicion that the network changed the portion of her response it aired in order to influence November’s election by shielding her from criticism.
The lawsuit recalls that CBS has been caught falsifying news in the past, citing news that CNSNews broke back in 2004:
“CBS’s misconduct here is evocative of the 2004 Dan Rather 60 Minutes scandal, where Rather presented four forged documents as authentic in an attempt to impugn President George W. Bush’s integrity regarding his service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972-73.”