CBS has asked the FCC to reject a complaint by a right-wing public interest law firm alleging a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris represented “news distortion” — with the Paramount Global-owned broadcaster saying the complaint is premised on the notion that the U.S. government can be a “roving censor.”
Last October, the Center for American Rights filed a complaint accusing CBS’s WCBS station in New York of “significant and intentional news distortion” through an interview with Harris on “Face the Nation” and “60 Minutes” that had “two conflicting responses.” Separately, President Trump sued CBS over the same interview, demanding $20 billion in damages and alleging violation of a consumer protection law; Paramount and CBS filed motions March 6 seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, calling it an “affront to the First Amendment.”
CBS, in its March 7 response to the FCC over the Center for American Rights complaint, said that “The Complaint filed against CBS for ‘news distortion’ envisions a less free world in which the federal government becomes a roving censor — one that second guesses and even punishes specific editorial decisions that are an essential part of producing news programming.”
“The protections of the First Amendment apply to all Americans, including broadcasters like CBS and its stations,” CBS said in the filing. “A broadcaster engages in protected speech activity whenever it ‘exercises editorial discretion in the selection and presentation of its programming.’… Were the Commission to find against CBS, it would open the door to regular and repeated second guessing of broadcasters’ editorial judgments across the ideological spectrum. The idea that the Commission could compel the broadcast of unedited interviews by broadcasters, or risk investigation as to the precise decisions made in the editing process, is patently unconstitutional.”
If the FCC took up the mantle of attempting to adjudicate complaints over news programming, CBS said, it would “become embroiled in a quagmire of impossible decisions that it has avoided assiduously for the past ninety years consistent with its Congressional mandate — the very opposite of government efficiency.”
The proceeding is FCC Media Bureau Docket No. 25-73. As of Monday, there were 8,239 documents and comments filed with the commission regarding the matter.
CBS, in its response, also said that the essence of the complaint — that the TV broadcaster somehow broke the law by airing a portion, but not all, of a political candidate’s answer to a question in a news magazine program — “is fatally flawed.” The complaint “not only ignores the narrowness of the Commission’s rarely invoked and constitutionally suspect ‘news distortion’ policy; it also asks the Commission to violate its duties under the U.S. Constitution, along with multiple statutory authorities,” CBS said. “Most notably, the First Amendment and Section 326 of the Communications Act do not tolerate the blatant interference with free speech that the Complaint envisions.”
