A “60 Minutes” correspondent defended CBS News’ controversial decision to air an edited version of Vice President Kamala Harris’ interview last week — but declined to comment on whether the full transcript should be released.
“Things get tweaked in every story,” Jon Wertheim said Wednesday on the “Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich” sports podcast on OutKick.com.
In addition to working as a correspondent for “60 Minutes,” Wertheim is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and a commentator for The Tennis Channel.
“You do these interviews and the ’60 Minutes’ segments [are] about 13 minutes and 10 seconds, right?” Wertheim said. “You spend hours, sometimes days and days, on the subject and, you know, it boils down to 13 minutes.”
Wertheim declined to answer whether the full transcript of the interview by “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker should be released, claiming it is “above [his] payment note.”
He argued that there are some statements in the transcripts that won’t make sense — and that news networks often edit out objectionable responses.
“It happens all the time when you do a ’60 Minutes’ interview. Someone says, ‘You know what, can you ask me again? I don’t like the way it came out,'” Wertheim said. “You don’t set their answer to seen there as an empathetic human being.”
CBS has faced a backlash for airing an edited version of Harris’ response to US relations with Israel on October 7, after airing her “word salad” response to the same question during a promo for the upcoming special on CBS “Face the Nation” the other day.
The editing decision provoked questions about whether CBS executives had moved to hide Harris’ more complicated answers.
Wertheim argued that major news networks — along with newspapers — regularly make editorial choices to save time or space, or to select the most influential quotes.
“When would you do a story and not edit, not make selections, and not do some kind of selective quoting?” Wertheim said. “When do you not make editorial choices in the media?”
Dakich, the podcast’s host, said the media constantly airs excerpts from interviews that make the guests look bad. Dakich said he regretted one of his answers after a past interview, but the media refused to take it down.
“I think what people are thinking is that ’60 Minutes’ and the mainstream media are trying to make Kamala Harris look good, as opposed to portraying who Kamala Harris really was in that interview,” Dakich said.
But Wertheim argued that “60 Minutes” did not change any of Harris’ answers.
“There was nothing doctored,” Wertheim said. “You just make editorial decisions to fit in at a time.”
Harris’ campaign has struggled to distance itself from the network’s editing controversy.
“We do not control CBS production decisions and direct questions to CBS,” a Harris campaign aide told multiple media outlets, including Fox News and Variety.
Former President Donald Trump and his campaign have called on CBS to release the full transcript of the interview.
“Why did 60 Minutes choose not to air Kamala’s full salad, and what else did they choose not to air?” Trump 2024 national press secretary Karoline Leavitt previously told The Post in a statement. “The American people deserve the full, unedited transcript of Kamala’s interview.”
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