February 1, 2025
Trump’s appointee to head the FCC, Brendan Carr, requested the transcript.
CBS News has agreed to comply with a request from the Trump Administration’s Federal Communications Commission to produce an unedited transcript of a “60 Minutes” interview the program conducted with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, a request that has sparked concerns of a politically vindictive administration.
According to The New York Times, previously, when Donald Trump was the Republican Party’s candidate, the news network refused to release the transcript.
The broadcast has since become the subject of a lawsuit by Trump, and CBS News indicated in a statement given by a spokesperson that they are obligated to release the transcript.
“We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do,” a spokesperson told the New York Times.
However, some, like Democratic commissioner at the FCC, Ana Gomez, were critical of the request, which came from Trump’s appointee to head the FCC, Brendan Carr.
According to Gomez, the request is cause for concern.
“Let’s be clear. This is a retaliatory move by the government against broadcasters whose content or coverage is perceived to be unfavorable. It is designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions,” Gomez wrote in a statement to the New York Times.
When Trump sued the network in 2024 for $10 billion, and asserted that the network deceptively edited the interview in a manner that was to the benefit of Harris’ candidacy for the presidency, most media law experts reached the conclusion that the lawsuit was an attempt to punish a news outlet, and CBS remarked that the lawsuit was “completely without merit.”
Though the FCC is technically an independent organization separate from the presidency, Carr, like many Trump appointees, has echoed Trump’s policy and has indicated that he is open to examining the alleged political bias of certain news organizations.
Per MSNBC, Carr is an author of Project 2025 and has been a prominent right-wing critic of the media, both positions that cannot be divorced from his current role at the FCC.
According to the New York Times, journalists at CBS News have indicated to the outlet privately that they are concerned about their network’s parent company capitulating to the Trump Administration when they believe that the lawsuit is winnable.
According to Vox, the various lawsuits against news media such as ABC News, the Des Moines Register, and one Iowa pollster, Ann Selzer, are examples of strategic litigation against public participation, or SLAPP suits.
According to Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the lawsuits are “the latest workaround that wealthy and powerful people who want to bully the press have found to attempt to circumvent the well-established safeguards for the press under the First Amendment against defamation and similar claims.”
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