CBS News is still smarting over Paramount’s decision to release the full transcript of the creatively-edited 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, which removed significant word salads from her responses. The beleaguered CBS Evening News is still defending the interview, even as the parties move closer to settling the $20B lawsuit.

Here is the full item defending the interview, which aired on the “Evening News Roundup” segment of the CBS Evening News on Wednesday, February 26th, 2025:

MAURICE DuBOIS: At that (Cabinet) meeting, the president made a false claim about the 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris last fall. The president claimed that after Harris was asked a question, quote: "They took out her answer and they inserted an entirely different answer", end quote. Not true. What viewers saw and heard was Harris' answer to the original question. The transcript shows, as 60 Minutes has said repeatedly, the broadcast was not doctored or deceitful. And you can watch the full, unedited interview for yourself on CBS News dot com.

The record reflects that CBS News got caught red-handed while editing Vice President Kamala Harris’s responses to correspondent Bill Whitaker, and that the network got caught airing different responses to the same question on 60 Minutes versus on Face the Nation.

As our colleague Nick Fondacaro noted when the raw video and transcript were released pursuant to the demand of these by the Federal Communications Commission:

After reviewing the video (clip from the raw video below), NewsBusters can confirm that what appeared on 60 Minutes was highly edited. Not only did they edit what appeared on 60 Minutes, they also edited what appeared on Face the Nation, including cutting out a hard hitting question that called out the Biden-Harris administration for looking weak on the world stage.

…

But what CBS did was pluck out a fragment of a sentence that was in the middle of a word salad being spoken by candidate a with a problem connecting with voters. Again, they also edited out their reporter asking a question with critical analysis against said candidate. They later followed up with a different 60 Minutes episode smearing said candidate’s opponent.

Compare what CBS actually did in furtherance of Harris’s candidacy to Maurice DuBois’ labored copy, which focuses on the semantics of Trump’s statement. There was indeed some taking out, and viewers saw something different to what was originally said. CBS News is desperately trying to cling to some shred of credibility in the midst of turmoil which includes cratering ratings subsequent to the ouster of anchor Norah O’Donnell, and a much-criticized overhaul of the Evening News (we told you so).

But the news division’s tripling down comes as its corporate parent, Paramount, has decided to enter into mediation with Trump- a necessary step towards coming into agreement on a settlement. Per The New York Post:

Lawyers representing Paramount and Donald Trump have agreed to bring in a mediator to facilitate discussions about a possible settlement in the president’s ongoing $20 billion lawsuit against subsidiary CBS, according to a report.

The decision to bring in a third party signals a potential effort by both sides to resolve the dispute outside of court, according to the New York Times.

The lawsuit filed by Trump accuses the CBS show “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, whose long-winded answer to a question about the Israel-Hamas conflict was condensed.

The decision to continually defend malicious and deceptive editing in the midst of potential settlement negotiations is but the latest in a string of incidents standing as proof evident of the decline and fall of CBS News.