CNN Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper called out Paramount’s “fealty” to Donald Trump in the wake of the company’s settlement over the editing of Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview.
“Editing is done all the time” and “there was no bias,” Tapper declared at Variety & Rolling Stone’s Truth Seekers Summit in New York on Thursday. “I will say this proudly underneath the Paramount+ banner, which is that lawsuit was bulls–t against 60 Minutes,” he added, referring to the streaming service’s sponsorship of the event at which he was speaking.
Trump sued the CBS parent company over what he claimed was “selective editing” of his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris’ answers on the weekend news program.
Despite 60 Minutes producers’ vigorous defense of their editing of the interview, Paramount decided to settle with Trump for $16 million ahead of its $8 billion merger with Skydance, which required approval from Trump’s administration.
“They wanted the merger to go through,” Tapper said Thursday, as he accepted the event’s Truth Seeker Award. He also expressed his belief that Paramount would have won the lawsuit against Trump without settling, “but it wasn’t about that. It was about fealty.”
Tapper also pointed to Fox News’ editing of Trump’s sit-down with Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy in 2024, where the TV version of Trump’s answer about whether or not he’d release the Epstein files differed significantly than the version that aired the following morning on the network’s radio station. While one edit shows him stating emphatically that he would “release” the files, the fuller answer reveals he had expressed hesitancy because “you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there.”
“That is a more egregious example of editing than what 60 Minutes did with Vice President Harris’ answer on the Middle East, which was basically a minute-and-a-half word salad,” Tapper added Thursday.
The CNN host’s book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again has earned him equal parts celebration and derision. While his CNN co-worker and News Night host Abby Phillip praised him as a “modern-day renaissance man” as she presented him the Truth Seeker award on Thursday, former MSNBC host Joy Reid torched Tapper over the revelations about Biden’s mental fitness in his book in June.
“All that book did was reveal… that you have a nightly news show, so you, five nights a week, could tell us what you know, but you know something and you’re like, ‘This is so juicy. I’ll hold it for a book.’ Really?” Reid said on The Breakfast Club.
Tapper insisted Thursday that media organizations should continue to call out the powers that be despite a “thirst among some to sue media organizations not for the purpose of justice or correcting the record but to bankrupt.”
“I don’t think that that should change our allegiance to facts and the truth and making sure we talk to the other side of the story and all that,” he said.
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