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The Media Today

Trump, Harris, and the Art of the Interview

The ethics of the CBS interview furor.
February 14, 2025 By Yona TR Golding
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

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If you were yearning to know what art Kamala Harris has hanging in her home, last week was a good week for you. An art tour was part of the pre-interview banter to which the public was made privy when, on February 5, both CBS News and the Federal Communications Commission released the uncut tape of Bill Whitaker’s October interview with the then–presidential candidate, filmed for an episode of 60 Minutes. The road to the publication of the footage began when the Center for American Rights (CAR), a conservative nonprofit, filed a complaint with the FCC against CBS; the group argued that, in a promotional spot for the episode that aired on a different CBS show, Face the Nation, Harris was shown giving a meandering response to a question from Whitaker about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, only for the episode itself to feature a much more cogent and concise answer. 

CAR took the opportunity to allege that CBS had manipulated the footage to help Harris’s campaign—though the full recording ultimately revealed that both segments were parts of Harris’s response to the question. The group’s complaint to the FCC was initially rejected by the outgoing chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, but was resubmitted after Trump’s appointee, Brendan Carr, took over. Carr requested the transcript from CBS and, in a post on X, implied that the complaint could affect the FCC’s decision as to whether to allow Paramount, the company that owns CBS, to move forward with the planned sale of its broadcast licenses to another company as part of a merger. Meanwhile, a legal drama has played out in parallel to the FCC action: Donald Trump sued CBS in northern Texas, citing a consumer protection statute and accusing the broadcaster of defrauding the public. (The statute is meant to protect against misleading advertising and other “deceptive trade practices.”) The New York Times and other outlets have reported that—though CBS has denied wrongdoing and legal experts think Trump’s case is weak—the station appears poised to settle, lest the lawsuit jeopardize the merger.

Seven media analysts independently told me that nothing improper appears to have happened behind the scenes at CBS when it comes to the Harris interview. “It’s standard practice to whittle down interviews to fit into time constraints,” Mark Feldstein, a former correspondent at CNN and ABC News who is now a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, said. “You’ll do the same after interviewing me, right? You’re not going to use all my comments.” (Transcript available upon request.) Legal experts largely agree that there is no case. Clay Calvert, a lawyer and nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, called both the FCC filing and Trump’s lawsuit “meritless nonstarters” that illustrate Trump’s “animosity toward press freedom.” He cited a 1973 Supreme Court case, Columbia Broadcasting System Inc. v. Democratic National Committee, in which the court ruled that, “for better or worse, editing is what editors are for.” At worst, the discrepancy between the clips indicates poor communication between editors: clumsy, perhaps, but not illegal. (CBS did not respond to requests for comment.) At best, the editors determined that the different contexts—a promotional clip versus a full-length episode—called for different content.

But the merits of the legal case are mostly beside the point. “We’re watching a fairly concerted effort to marginalize legitimate journalism,” Philip Michael Napoli, a professor of media policy at Duke University, told me. CJR has reported many, many times about Trump’s strategic targeting of the press, and how it serves not only to intimidate journalists but to discourage the public from trusting critical coverage that does emerge. In the past week alone, he barred an Associated Press reporter from the Oval Office because the AP’s style guide still refers to the expanse of water between Mexico and Florida as the Gulf of Mexico, despite Trump renaming it the Gulf of America (part of the “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” executive order); yesterday, an AP reporter was blocked from the Oval for the third day in a row. Elon Musk and other Trump allies have attacked journalists by name over critical reporting and suggested that their articles may amount to criminal “doxxing” of federal officials. Today, an “Annual Media Rotation Program” was scheduled to take effect at the Pentagon, according to NBC, transferring office space from the likes of NBC, NPR, and the Times to outlets including Breitbart, One America News, and, confusingly, HuffPost, which didn’t ask for it. 

In March 2019, during Trump’s first term, the historian Michael Schudson wrote for CJR that Trump was not the first American president to wage a calculated campaign to discredit those who gather and publish the news. He explained that the word “media” itself came to replace “press” in popular parlance thanks in part to Richard Nixon, who believed that the change would spur Americans to associate journalists with the manipulations of the advertising industry. Schudson argued that, in the current political climate, it’s “economic inequality and inequality of social recognition and dignity,” and not a failure of journalistic practices, that feeds Trump’s efforts to discredit the media in the eyes of the public. The appropriate response, then, is for journalists to hold the line: “Some things are more important than how people respond to pollsters asking about trust,” Schudson wrote. “One of those things is responsible, accountability-centered journalism.” 

In this light, the fact that CBS is reportedly considering a settlement with Trump for the sake of its business interests—and has already implicitly accepted the FCC’s authority to adjudicate the same matter by turning over the interview recording and transcript without a fight—would appear to be a dangerous concession that invites future attack and legitimizes the use of a federal agency as a political cudgel. And, perhaps ironically given the station’s desire not to become even more deeply embroiled in controversy, it might also do nothing to redeem CBS in the court of public opinion. “In journalism ethics, the appearance of impropriety is exactly the same as actual impropriety,” John Watson, a professor of journalism ethics and communication law at American University, told me. “If you pay someone off while complaining that you didn’t need to pay them off because you didn’t do anything wrong, you might as well have done that horrible thing as far as the general public’s understanding is concerned.” Of course, letting the lawsuit go to trial would also be an imperfect solution: that, Watson said, would generate tens of millions of dollars in free publicity for Trump. From that perspective, Trump wins “irrespective of what the court of last resort says,” Watson told me. “Journalism loses—except in the sense that it stood up for the right thing.”

Harris, by the way, has American art hanging in her home, including works by Carrie Mae Weems, Fred Wilson, and Ed Clark. You can read Schudson’s 2019 essay here.

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Other notable stories:

  • Last year, we learned that Rupert Murdoch was locked in an extraordinary legal battle with his four oldest children over the terms of his inheritance; control of his media empire was supposed to pass to all four upon his death, and irrevocably so, but Murdoch was trying to change the terms to hand control to Lachlan, his most conservative child. A commissioner in Nevada blocked the move in December; it is now under appeal. The proceedings played out mostly in secret—but Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, of the Times, obtained thousands of pages from the trial record and published a detailed article based on them yesterday. Mahler and Rutenberg have long covered the Murdoch dynasty, they write, but “have never been afforded a more revealing window into it.”
  • And a review by the AP found that Tesla, Musk’s car company, has taken an aggressive stance against critics in China, launching defamation lawsuits against at least six car owners who reported issues, six bloggers who covered the company critically, and two whole news outlets—and winning almost all those cases. (The others reviewed by the AP were settled or are on appeal.) Two anonymous Chinese journalists based in Shanghai told the AP that “there is an unwritten rule to avoid critical coverage of Tesla.”

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Yona TR Golding was a CJR fellow.