JUST IN: Internal Chaos Explodes At CBS Amid ’60 Minutes’ Kamala Scandal
Staffers for CBS News are reportedly getting agitated about all of the hoopla surrounding the “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris from last October, which is now at the center of a very heated legal controversy. The network’s employees are having “mixed emotions” after the program’s executive producer, Bill Owens, told some of his colleagues at Monday’s meeting that the edit of the interview was “perfectly fine.”
“‘Is the edit fine?’ one CBS News insider is said to have commented in an obvious rhetorical question. “It’s obviously an unforced error. Several sources said the discrepancy was preventable, and argued that Owens and ‘60 Minutes’ should have taken greater care to ensure consistency between the two interview clips, especially given the high stakes of the presidential election and the scrutiny at the time on Harris’s performance in interviews.”
More than a few of the employees of CBS News are blaming Owens for “leaving them vulnerable to this situation in the first place,” which he did by doing the edit in the first place. Staffers who attended the meeting held on Monday considered putting out a statement of their own or possibly quitting their jobs, which correspondents Anderson Cooper and Scott Pelley both pushed back on.
Cooper allegedly warned the more rebellious staffers in the group that there are few to no alternatives available in the current media landscape, which is quickly drying up to make way for new media like podcasting, where they could produce the same kind of work they make for CBS.
Anxiety is reportedly through the roof over whether or not the network is going to settle President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit, which Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone is on board with and has some within the company “quietly rebelling.”
On Thursday, President Trump offered his reaction to the FCC’s release of the full interview and transcript, making the argument that the news outlet “defrauded the public.”
“CBS and 60 Minutes defrauded the public by doing something which has never, to this extent, been seen before. They 100% removed Kamala’s horrible election-changing answers to questions, and replaced them with completely different, and far better, answers, taken from another part of the interview,” Trump stated in a post published on Truth Social.
“This was Election-changing ‘stuff,’ Election Interference and, quite simply, Election Fraud at a level never seen before. CBS should lose its license, and the cheaters at 60 Minutes should all be thrown out, and this disreputable ‘NEWS’ show should be immediately terminated,” he added.