Let’s face it.
CBS News’ decision to air only live or unedited pre-recorded interviews on “Face the Nation,” its long-running Sunday public affairs program, is troubling, shortsighted, and further proof that a once gold standard news organization is yet again bowing to pressure from the Trump administration.
Here’s the background: On August 31st, Kristi Noem, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, was interviewed by CBS News correspondent Ed O’Keefe, substituting for anchor Margaret Brennan. As is the custom with many network news programs, including “Face the Nation,” the interview was pre-taped and edited for time without changing the context. But in a news release and on X, Noem accused CBS News of “shamefully” editing her answers, cutting nearly four minutes out of the full interview that she said lasted 16 minutes and 40 seconds.
Specifically, she said 25 seconds were eliminated from the interview in which she spoke about Kilmer Abrego Garcia, who was deported earlier this year by the Trump administration and who it accused of being an MS-13 gang member. Some of her comments included unsubstantiated accusations against Garcia, which he has denied.
On Friday CBS News issued a statement saying, “In response to audience feedback over the past week, we have implemented a new policy for greater transparency in our interviews. This extra measure means the television audience will see the full, unedited interview on CBS and we will continue our practice of posting full transcripts and the unedited video online.”
Perhaps the most important role of a reporter is to distill an interview, selecting the quotes that best and most accurately reflect what our subjects said.
I covered CBS News for many years as a reporter at Variety, Newsday/New York Newsday, and The Wall Street Journal, and I was taken aback at CBS News’ immediate surrender of its editorial judgment. I have interviewed literally thousands of individuals, including network news executives, anchors, reporters, producers, and politicians and never once has anyone accused me — or any of my colleagues — of ever misquoting or taking their words out of context.
Perhaps the most important role of a reporter is to distill an interview, selecting the quotes that best and most accurately reflect what our subjects said. To abandon that principle is to step onto yet another ill-advised slippery slope for CBS News.
And where does it end? If “Face the Nation” must air only unedited interviews, will other CBS News programs such as “Sunday Morning” or, more troubling, “60 Minutes” be forced to follow? Last year, President Trump sued the news division for $20 billion, accusing it of deceptively editing an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, in order to, he alleged, help her chances of winning the 2024 presidential election. That suit, which legal experts said was baseless, was settled by CBS’s then-parent company Paramount Global for $16 million to ensure its sale to Skydance Media was approved by federal regulators.
Will the Trump administration, which saw CBS capitulate so quickly and easily, next target NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week” and similar programs on CNN and MSNBC?
Live interviews bring their own hazards: Guests can filibuster, lie with abandon without on-the-spot fact-checking, or simply evade answering the question by pivoting to talking points. Sometimes pre-taped appearances cannot be avoided due to a guest’s scheduling conflicts. CBS News should have said it will continue to responsibly edit its interviews for broadcast as well as publish the unedited transcripts and video on its website. Period.
Perhaps there is no better example of how risky live interviews can be than the one CBS News anchor Dan Rather did with Vice President George H.W. Bush when he was running for president. On the “CBS Evening News” on January 25, 1988, a report aired prior to Bush’s live interview that explored his role in the Iran-contra affair—the Reagan White House had secretly sold arms to Iran and funneled the proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels, a covert maneuver that ran directly against U.S. law and its own stated policy. Bush had always maintained he was “out of the loop,” although it was later learned he attended meetings where arms sales were discussed.
Once the interview began, it quickly degenerated into a virtual shouting match.
Bush came out swinging and said he was “misled” as he was told by a CBS News producer that this would be a political profile and not an interrogation of the Iran-contra affair. At one point, Bush brought up the time Rather left the anchor desk when a tennis match carried on CBS ran longer than expected. When the match was over, there was no Rather and the network went to black. “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran,” Bush said. “How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York? Would you like that? I have respect for you, but I don’t have respect for what you’re doing here tonight.”
I was in CBS’s newsroom that evening, having been tipped off that the interview might result in an interesting story — although I’m sure this isn’t what my source had in mind. After the predictable fallout for CBS News and for Rather, I interviewed former News President Richard Salant, who criticized agreeing to a live interview.
CBS News executives should heed his advice: “You never allow lengthy interviews in a live news program,” he said. “It gets out of hand the minute it begins.”
Trust in mass media is at its lowest point in more than 50 years. For CBS News to bow to an administration that wields “fake news” as a weapon against facts it wishes weren’t facts is an abdication of a core responsibility of journalism: gathering information, vetting it, and editing it responsibly. If reporters are denied this basic function, then what, exactly, is their purpose?
With this abandonment of its journalistic responsibility, CBS News should be red-faced from embarrassment.
Kevin Goldman, who covered the media with a specialty in broadcast journalism for Variety, Newsday/New York Newsday and The Wall Street Journal, is the author of Conflicting Accounts: The Creation and Crash of the Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Empire (Simon & Schuster), and is currently writing a memoir.
