Donald Trump again lashed out at 60 Minutes, this time angry over two segments the newsmagazine ran on Ukraine and Greenland.
The president’s attacks on the media and 60 Minutes are nothing new; what’s different this term is he’s tried to assert authority over independent agencies that regulate the media business.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump called on the network to lose their license and for his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, to “impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.”
The two 60 Minutes segments were pretty standard for the newsmagazine. One featured an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In the segment, Scott Pelley noted that Trump “rewrote history, saying, falsely, that Ukraine had started the war,” before running a clip in which the president referred to Zelensky as a “dictator.”
“I believe, sadly, Russian narratives are prevailing in the U.S. How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war? This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on U.S. politics, and U.S. politicians.”
Zelensky then invited Trump to visit Ukraine to see what Putin has done to the country.
In the segment on Greenland, Jon Wertheim spoke to residents who talked of their opposition to the U.S. annexing the country. “Greenland is for Greenlanders, not for anybody else,” said its prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen.
Trump’s latest comments come amid reports that a mediate has been selected to try to come to a settlement in his $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris. The president claimed that the network purposely made Harris look better to help her campaign, something that the network denies.
The lawsuit, filed in Texas federal court, claims that the network violated the Texas Deceptive Practices Act, but many legal observers find the litigation frivolous. Trump claims that his media company, which owns Truth Social, was harmed because the 60 Minutes segment diverted traffic away from his platform.
Nevertheless, Paramount Global, the parent of CBS, is seeking regulatory approval for its merger with Skydance, and seeing that the transaction gets the Trump administration’s greenlight is the rationale behind a lawsuit settlement.
Carr, meanwhile, launched an inquiry into the 60 Minutes Kamala Harris segment following a complaint that the network violated the FCC’s “news distortion” policy. But the FCC’s authority is narrow, and the agency acknowledges that it “is prohibited by law from engaging in censorship or infringing on First Amendment rights of the press.”
CBS has provided the FCC with the unedited transcript of the Harris interview, and it shows “that the 60 Minutes broadcast was not doctored or deceitful,” the newsmagazine said in a February statement.
“In reporting the news, journalists regularly edit interviews – for time, space or clarity. In making these edits, 60 Minutes is always guided by the truth and what we believe will be most informative to the viewing public – all while working within the constraints of broadcast television,” 60 Minutes said in the statement.
That said, Trump’s latest statement seems to be an effort to put further pressure on Paramount as it seeks merger approval. It also puts pressure on Carr to enact some kind of a punishment on CBS, even if the network, under ordinary circumstances, would likely challenge any action in court on First Amendment grounds. Trump has tried to send the message that commissioners who don’t support the administration’s agenda risk getting fired, as he ousted the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC last month.
In his first term, Trump suggested that the FCC pull the license of NBC after he lashed out at the network’s news reporting. But his FCC chairman then, Ajit Pai, defended the First Amendment and said, that “under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast.”
60 Minutes, meanwhile, has not retreated from hard-hitting pieces on the Trump administration, broadcasting segments just about every week since he took office.
