Nine in ten voters say CBS should release the full transcript of its October 7 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris which the network edited before airing in an apparent attempt to present Harris’s comments in an unrealistically favorable manner.
CBS issued a statement this week denying allegations that it deceitfully edited Harris’ answers to questions – but, it obdurately continues to refuse to release the full video and transcript of the interview.
By releasing the full transcript of the October 7, 2024 interview, CBS would enable the public to judge whether or not the edits made before airing were biased and made to dishonestly portray Democrat Presidential Candidate Harris’s remarks.
And, Americans overwhelmingly do want to see for themselves what actually took place in the CBS interview, a CAPS/Harris survey finds. (The Harris poll, which has been around since the Sixties, is in no way related to Kamala Harris.)
A national survey of registered voters, conducted October 11-13 by The Harris Poll and HarrisX, asked the following question:
“Should CBS release the full transcript of its interview with Kamala Harris or not release the full transcript?”
Fully 85% of voters – including 87% of Democrats, 88% of Republicans, and 80% of Independents/Others say that, yes, CBS should release the full transcript.
Even seeing the full transcript, a majority (53%) of voters say “CBS has edited their interview with Kamala Harris to make her look better.”
Partisanship appears to have had a strong influence over voters’ beliefs, however. While 81% of Republicans think the interview was edited to make Harris look better, 73% of Democrats believe CBS was “fair and objective in their editing.” Independent/Other voters were evenly divided (50%-50%) in their opinions of the integrity of CBS’s editing.
The controversy was sparked when CBS changed Harris’ answer to a question it aired, as NewsBusters explained in an October 9 report:
“Brian Flood and David Rutz at FoxNews.com reported that CBS aired two different answers to the same question on Israel in its 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. First they aired a word-salad answer on Sunday’s Face the Nation. But when the interview aired on Monday night, the answer was entirely different.”
“This is obviously not the first time 60 Minutes has made a hash out of editing a politician. They deceptively edited a hit piece on Gov. Ron DeSantis over Covid vaccines in 2021,” NewsBusters explains. “Then, of course, there's the difference between the video Trump made of his battle with Lesley Stahl over the Biden influence-peddling scandals in October 2020, and the video that CBS put on television.”
The CAPS/Harris poll finds that voters are also strongly divided along party lines about whether Harris’s recent interviews on 60 Minutes, Howard Stern and Call Her Daddy helped or hurt her, with Democrats largely saying they helped (86%) and Republicans saying they hurt (81%).
A 54% majority of Independents/Others say the recent interviews hurt Harris.
Voters generally distrust all network news taken together, as 56% say news departments are “run more by partisan activists” than by “fair, even-handed journalist.”
Again, however, Democrats are trusting of network news, while Republicans and Independents/Others see political propaganda being peddled. Among Democrats, 59% say objective journalists are running network news. But, 67% of Republicans and 61% of Independents/Others say “partisan activists” are controlling network news coverage.
