Donald Trump is said to have threatened to revoke the broadcast license for CBS News in an apparent response to a report by a right-wing news site that claimed "60 Minutes" made misleading edits to make Vice President Kamala Harris look better during her recent interview.
The vice president sat down for an interview with correspondent Bill Whitaker, who asked at one point whether Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was listening to the Biden administration's concerns about the war in Gaza, and the Trump campaign pointed out that her answer was different in a promotional clip posted on social media from what she said in the full interview that aired Monday night.
“The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things," Harris says in the truncated clip, "including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
However, in the interview, her immediate response to the same question was: “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
The Trump campaign called that answer "word salad," and the former president called the edited promotional clip a "possibly illegal" campaign finance violation and suggested he would revoke the news division's license – which Trump has threatened to do to other networks, although the independent Federal Communications Commission does not license broadcast networks but only individual broadcast stations.
"He's threatening a broadcast network’s ability to operate," posted the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. "This is dictator talk."
"There are no network broadcast licenses," said veteran broadcaster Keith Olbermann. "If Trump wants to take the licenses away from the local stations CBS and the others own I'm sure they'd be delighted to have these financial albatrosses off their books."
Former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski said, "Trump now threatens the broadcast license of another media company, this time CBS and 60 Minutes."
"He has now threatened to go after NBC, ABC & CBS if elected, while each of them continue to treat him as a sane and normal candidate," he added.