The Wall Street Journal Torches Trump for Trying to ‘Intimidate the Press’ With Crusade Over CBS-Kamala Harris Interview

(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The Wall Street Journal took President Donald Trump to task for trying to “intimidate the press” by continuing his crusade against CBS over its editing of an interview with former Vice President — and then Democratic presidential nominee — Kamala Harris last fall.

“President Trump has spent months howling that CBS should lose its broadcast license, because its editing of an interview with Kamala Harris amid the 2024 campaign was, as he put it Thursday, ‘quite simply, Election Fraud,’ not to mention ‘the biggest Broadcasting SCANDAL in History!!!'” noted the Journal‘s editorial board on Sunday night.

Trump’s complaint stems back to two different edited versions of Harris’s answer to a question about the Biden administration’s handling of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas aired by CBS.

But while Trump has argued that the two edits were reflective of CBS’s desire to aid Harris and misrepresent her abilities, the Journal submitted that they were a product of “editorial judgment, not an instance of splicing footage to create a misleading response that never happened.”

It continued:

Last week the FCC opened a docket and public comment on the CBS complaint, prompting criticism from the left. Yet the agency also took comments after a left-of-center group in 2023 cited Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 election to challenge the license renewal of a local Fox TV station in Philadelphia. (The Journal has a weekend show on Fox News.)

That Fox dispute was ended in January, four days before President Biden left office, with the FCC dismissing the complaint as involving unregulated cable TV, not broadcast, while citing the First Amendment.

A similar conclusion to the CBS brouhaha would be for the best. What raises eyebrows, however, is that Mr. Trump is also suing the network, demanding damages of—Mike Myers’s Dr. Evil voice here—$20 billion.

“Mr. Trump clearly wants to intimidate the press, and it’s no credit to the FCC to see it reinforcing that with an inquiry,” concluded editorial. “The bad Biden FCC precedent against Fox is no justification for the Trump FCC to do the same against the liberal press.”