SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly criticized CBS News on Thursday during her podcast for its whitewash of the editing of Vice President Kamala Harris’ response in her interview with “60 Minutes.”
Harris’ campaign announced that the vice president would appear on “60 Minutes,” along with other media engagements, following backlash for her inability to clarify her shifting positions on left-wing policies. On “The Megyn Kelly Show,” Kelly highlighted how CBS released a different version on X compared to the full interview on YouTube, specifically regarding Harris’ response to a question about the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
“It turns out we should have been even more attentive to what 60 had done to that interview. It was very obviously edited, but we didn’t quite put it together that they had edited the answer they put out as their tease on Sunday and Monday by the time the piece aired on Monday night. It was a pretty shocking scrubbing of a word salad answer by Kamala Harris, so here’s what I think happened,” Kelly said.
“They put out this Q&A, just like a quick Q&A, about whether [or] not Netanyahu is listening to us and they included in their tease her word salad answer or at least part of it. They, because they’re liberals, don’t see her answers as word salady,” Kelly continued. “They’re like, ‘Yeah that’s our girl look at her. She’s saying tough things.’ No one realized that this was going to make her look bad because they would not have released it this way had they done that, had they realized that.”
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Kelly noted that online users quickly criticized the X version of the clip for Harris’ fumbled response, pointing out that the edited version presented a “cleaner” response.
“So by the time they aired the interview in full on Monday night they had cleaned up the answer. They had pulled a much shorter, tighter but still inane phrase from a different part of her answer and they whitewashed the word salad and sort of got rid of all the word salad and boiled it down to like one green pepper. It was no longer a salad, it was just one green pepper that you could understand and eat easily,” Kelly said.
In the clip shown by Kelly, Harris responded to CBS host Bill Whitaker, who pressed her on Israel, stating that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not been “listening to the Biden-Harris administration.”
In a “60 Minutes’” post on X, Harris stumbled as she described how “the work” of the Biden-Harris administration has “resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.” However, in the YouTube edited version, she clearly stated, “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
“Oh my God. I mean you see what they did don’t you? It’s so nakedly partisan and desperate to save her. That first answer is just classic Kamala Harris isn’t it?” Kelly said. “This is CBS running cover for Kamala Harris. I’m amazed they had the guts to do it given that they had released the tease.”
“Normally you’d have a discussion behind closed doors saying, ‘Now we’ve got to live with it. We put it out as the tease guys. We’re going to get hit if we clean it up and try to make her look better. We’ve already released the real answer.’ But nobody did that and now we know,” Kelly concluded.
Harris’ campaign has since responded to the controversy, telling Variety that, “We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS.”
