RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’d like to add a brief note tonight on a kerfuffle of less matter and moment than the other debates of greater importance currently raging throughout American political media. (To name but one example: How many times will Kamala Harris and her media surrogates try to sell “Donald Trump is old and tired” as a campaign talking point before giving up at the transparent futility of it all?)

Earlier this month Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes, and it went just about as well her other various media encounters have: rather poorly. She served up her usual word salad, and I don’t recall there being much for me to say about it that wasn’t already covered well enough by my colleagues.

One little detail that nagged at me, however, was the way in which 60 Minutes edited their interview with Harris after first airing a preview of it on Face the Nation. When interviewer Bill Whitaker queried Harris about the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomatic relationship with Israel, Harris began with a rambling, lost prelude that amounted to her typical rhetorical churn. Then she collected herself and remembered her canned answer.

Later on, when the interview aired on 60 Minutes, that opening word jumble — which made Harris look remarkably weak — was edited away from Harris’s response. Instead of looking like a deer in the headlights unable to quickly answer, she was presented to viewers as a crisper speaker and thinker than she was.

I didn’t think it was a terribly big deal — even the “hero’s edit” from CBS News could not make Kamala Harris appear to be a competent thinker — and even though Trump predictably cried “election interference” about the whole thing, I moved on without comment.

Until last night, that is, when 60 Minutes took the rare action of issuing an official statement on the matter where, when confronted with the indisputable evidence of its selective editing to make Harris more coherent, the show frankly admitted it and doubled down on defense, saying it was a perfectly acceptable edit because it made her seem “more succinct,” thus allowing time for coverage of other issues.

Let us set aside the fact that it is in fact of great and newsworthy importance if Kamala Harris cannot answer a simple question about her Middle East policy without backfiring like an old gasoline-powered lawn mower. Let us forgive the obvious exercise of “news judgment” in a manner so clearly prejudicial in favor of Harris, concealing her most glaring weakness — her vacuous incoherence. Let us instead ask why CBS News and 60 Minutes still refuse to release an unedited transcript of their interview with Harris, despite having done so when Catherine Herridge interviewed Trump for them back in 2020. Imagine what it must conceal.