The FCC is pursuing an investigation into CBS’ edits of an October 2024 interview with then-Vice President and Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris
Washington (July 16, 2025) - Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) today wrote to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr about a “Fox & Friends” June 2024 interview in which Donald Trump was asked whether he would release the Epstein files if he were elected president. The network aired only a portion of Trump’s answers, potentially misleading viewers about Trump’s intentions regarding those files. This past weekend, Donald Trump discounted the importance of the Epstein Files on Truth Social.
In the June interview, Trump appeared to have answered the question about whether he would release the Epstein files by saying “Yeah, yeah I would.” But right after those words — in a portion of the interview unaired on “Fox & Friends” — Trump appeared to hedge his answer by saying, “I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.” Asked if it would restore trust, he said, “Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one.”
In the letter, the lawmakers write, “When the full interview was released on a Fox News radio program, reporters picked up on this selective editing, suggesting that Fox News ‘massaged’ the interview. No wonder, then, many Trump’s supporters were surprised this weekend when Trump said his supporters should ‘not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein.’ This selective editing appears to be far more misleading than the run-of-the-mill editorial decision-making in CBS’s interview with Harris last fall. In October 2024, CBS aired excerpts from an interview with Harris on its programs 60 Minutes and Face the Nation. As the transcript of the interview — which you effectively forced CBS to release after months of public pressure — demonstrates, the excerpts aired on CBS were a quintessential example of editorial decision-making. In stark contrast to Fox News’s handling of Trump’s interview, CBS’s edits did not alter the meaning of any of Harris’s answers. Yet, the FCC has opened a docket to accept comments on the Harris interview as a potential violation of the FCC’s little-used news distortion policy, an outrageous abuse of the Commission’s enforcement powers.”
The lawmakers conclude, “The FCC should stop its partisan investigations into the news media and cease interfering with independent journalism altogether. To be clear, the FCC should not investigate or pressure either CBS or Fox. Editorial discretion lies at the heart of press freedom and should not be subject to government interference. Rather than opening an investigation into Fox, the FCC should close the docket in its investigation over the Harris interview on 60 Minutes and stop wielding its regulatory power as a weapon against the news media.”
###
