‘60 Minutes’ and Trump: the extended version
In 2024 Donald Trump sued CBS News over its edited version of an interview it conducted with Vice President Kamala Harris during her 2024 campaign for the presidency.
CBS called the lawsuit “completely without merit” at the time, then reached a $16 million settlement.
The network has interviewed Trump twice this year, in both cases broadcasting an edited version and making the complete interviews available online. He has not sued.
Mike Masnick, writing in Techdirt in May, made a detailed comparison of the edited vs unedited versions of that earlier interview, fact-checking as he went along. He concluded:
The editorial pattern is consistent throughout: 60 Minutes’ producers cut the parts where Trump sounded unhinged and kept the parts where he sounded like a slightly more normal politician answering questions.
This is, of course, exactly what 60 Minutes has always done with every politician they’ve ever interviewed. It’s the entire format. You sit someone down for 40 minutes or an hour, then you edit it down to ten to 15 minutes to fit the broadcast window, and you try to focus on the parts that actually make sense for television. This is television journalism, and it has worked this way since 60 Minutes premiered in 1968.
When CBS did this with Harris, plenty of people — including us — pointed out that this was just how the show works. The lawsuit was, as we noted at the time, a “blatant attack on free speech and the First Amendment, as editorial discretion is a protected right of news organizations.” Any first-year law student could tell you that. Hell anyone familiar with the First Amendment could tell you that. Trump’s own lawyers presumably knew it. The judge who would have eventually ruled on it would have known it.
But Trump didn’t need to win the lawsuit. He just needed CBS to care more about making the headache disappear than standing on principle. And because Paramount’s owners wanted their Skydance merger approved by Trump’s FCC and DOJ, they paid him $16 million to make it disappear.
Similarly, the latest interview with Trump, as broadcast Sunday, does a lot of cleaning up. Both Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, writing in The New Republic, and Parker Molloy, writing for The Present Age, compared the edited version to the complete interview. Molloy wrote:
More than 28 minutes of the extended version never made it to air, and not all of it was hellos and thank-yous.
When Douthat asked whether even the January 6 rioters “who attacked police officers were treated unfairly,” Trump answered, “Well, there— there were some that— there were some that got rough, but, you know, they were rough to them too.” Douthat followed up with “Don’t cops have a right to use force against people—” and none of that exchange aired. Neither did Trump saying he thinks he has the power to pardon himself (”I do”), or his line about pardoning “anybody that get— got within a thousand miles of the Oval Office.” Or “I’ve settled eight wars. I settled eight wars,” along with his claim that Pakistan’s prime minister said “Trump saved 30-50 million lives.”
Whichever version you watch, the challenge for any interviewer is clear: the endless stream of misinformation and word salad.
FactCheck.org took on the Herculean task. It only served to underscore what Bill Grueskin posted earlier in the week on Bluesky:
I was wondering why I’m one of the few who are unimpressed by the 60 Minutes Trump interview, and I think it’s because I’m not especially interested in what he has to say anymore. He lies, he deflects, he dodges. Nothing he says today will have any meaning tomorrow.
Where does that leave the coming political debate?