The Federal Communications Commission’s chairwoman slammed former president Donald Trump on Thursday for suggesting that CBS’s broadcast license be revoked because the network edited Vice President Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview to make one of her answers appear more concise and less confusing.
FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the independent federal agency “does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.” She cast Trump’s rhetoric against CBS News as an attack on the First Amendment.
“While repeated attacks against broadcast stations by the former President may now be familiar, these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored,” Rosenworcel said in a statement.
Trump targeted CBS in a series of Truth Social posts on Thursday morning, declaring that the network “should lose its license” and “should be bid out to the Highest Bidder” along with all broadcast licenses.
The former president referenced the vice president’s long-winded answer to 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker’s question about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rebuffing of the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomatic pleas to prevent an all-out regional war in the Middle East.
“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,” Harris answered originally.
The preview clip was aired on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday to promote the 60 Minutes sit-down interview that debuted Monday night. However, the answer was later cut to make Harris appear more cogent.
“We are 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,” Harris replied in the edited version of the interview.
CBS posted both versions of Harris’s answer on its YouTube channel, and X users shared the clips spliced together to note the difference between them. Trump used one of those videos to make his aforementioned point about the network’s bias.
“A giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes. Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better,” Trump posted. “A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference.”
On Tuesday, the Trump campaign called for CBS to release the “full, unedited transcript” of the interview. The New York Post urged CBS to do the same in an editorial published Thursday night.
Trump criticized ABC News last month after its presidential-debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, fact-checked him without doing the same to Harris. Following the debate, the GOP nominee told Fox & Friends that government regulators should “take away” ABC’s license.
Rosenworcel defended ABC in a similar fashion as she did CBS. The FCC does not license television or radio networks, only individual stations owned by such networks. Each license issued by the FCC lasts for eight years.
Rosenworcel was nominated to the FCC by President Barack Obama in 2011 and renominated by Trump in 2017. Biden named her the chairwoman of the commission in 2021.