Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Nathan Simington said that CBS’s selective editing of its “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris should likely be investigated in response to allegations of news distortion.
“Our precedent provides that the Commission may investigate an intentional, substantial, and material distortion of the news, where, as arguably here alleged, ‘outtakes’ from a news segment appear to substantiate genuine concerns around ‘splicing’ answers of an interviewee,” Simington said in a statement to The Federalist. “A complaint need not fully factually prove an allegation of news distortion; it need only raise a substantial and material question of fact.”
While Simington said that the FCC should take a cautious approach to looking into CBS’s apparent distortion of Harris’s answer, he also said that the commission should take the complaint seriously and that it likely means opening an inquiry.
“The Commission is not a roving arbiter of truth. We do not second-guess genuine editorial judgment. And if the exercise of good-faith editorial judgment is ultimately all that happened, then the Commission cannot and should not act to censor or otherwise ‘punish’ a licensee,” Simington said. “The application of our news distortion policy is intentionally narrowly-specified. But that does not mean that nothing a licensee does can ever trigger it. The Commission can and should take the complaint seriously. That might, and probably does, mean opening an inquiry.”
Simington’s statement came after an organization filed a complaint with the FCC, seeking to compel CBS to release a full video
