Brian Kilmeade Challenges FCC’s Brendan Carr on the Precedent Set By CBS Investigation

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade challenged newly appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr over an investigation into the possibility that CBS engaged in “news distortion” over a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.

At issue is an interview conducted by Bill Whitaker with the Democratic nominee conducted just one month before the November general election. The segment aired on Oct. 7, the anniversary of the brutal attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas,  and so the U.S. relationship with Israel was an early question.

CBS’s Face the Nation aired a clip from the interview as a promotional tease, which featured Harris answering Whitaker’s ostensibly questioning why Israel appears to have been ignoring the Biden Administration. But when the full interview aired on 60 Minutes the next  night, Harris was shown answering with a different response. The transcripts reveal that the two different answers were from the same question, though the latter that aired Monday night was more concise and declarative.

The Trump campaign has sued CBS for $10 million, alleging election interference, and just Thursday morning, Trump called for CBS to lose its license over what he sees as grave malfeasance. Trump posted on Truth Social:

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. 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. With the new Democrat scandal that just arose with respect to USAID illegally paying large sums of money to Politico and other media outlets, the question must me asked, was CBS paid for committing this FRAUD??? Many other questions to come! This will go down as the biggest Broadcasting SCANDAL in History!!!

Under pressure, CBS changed its policy of not releasing the transcripts publicly on Wednesday, posting raw video footage and transcripts from Whitaker’s multiple interviews with Harris.

While conservative outlets have been quick to point out edits from the raw footage to what aired, the transcripts reveal standard operating news production process and procedure conducted by nearly every news outlet with almost every high-profile interview subject, including, for example, Fox News Primetime opinion hosts with Trump.

So it is in this context that Kilmeade got to the essence of the great concern and potential chilling effect that every media outlet should see with FCC’s investigation.

“Meanwhile, the other big story is 60 Minutes and you said you have to turn over the transcripts,” Kilmeade noted.  “Are you worried about the precedent of asking for these transcripts? Because now everybody that has to edit down an interview with a high-profile figure will have the same situation?”

“No, not at all,” Carr pushed back. “It’s actually interesting. Here is a precedent we’re following is the precedent that the Democrat FCC set when it came to Fox. There was a complaint lodged against Fox, and so they opened up a public proceeding on that. And we’re simply applying that precedent.”

“You know, look, there’s a lot of people in this country right now on the radical left that are upset about this investigation of the CBS and the work that I’m doing on broadcasters,” he added. “To paraphrase Thomas Sewell, when the government isn’t weaponized in your favor, it feels like discrimination when, all of a sudden, there’s evenhanded treatment. There are a lot of people who have been on this sort of upper road of the two-tiered system of government. And what I’m here to do is apply the law evenly.”

“This is a rare situation where we had extrinsic evidence that CBS had only one answer, one set of words, and then swapped in, another said, and CBS has contact through this, frankly, has been concerning,” he continued. “You know, look, they just did an interview with Vice President Vance and immediately fully disclosed the unedited transcript. For some reason they decided not to do that in this case. And so we’ve now opened a proceeding. We think it’s in the public interest to allow people to participate in comment. And we’re going to take this one step at a time at the FCC.”

Watch above via Fox News.