Fox News edited a recent interview with Donald Trump in a Bronx barbershop to remove several of the Republican presidential nominee’s lies and meandering comments, CNN reported Thursday.
At one point in the interview, CNN noted that Trump was asked about eliminating federal taxes in the future. In the clip that aired on Fox & Friends Trump immediately answered that “there is a way.”
But in the unedited clip viewed by CNN, Trump veered off into unrelated topics, including inheritance, the Keystone Pipeline, Russia, Ronald Reagan, and transgender athletes. He finally gave that four word response that Fox News aired seven minutes later after several nudges from an audience member.
Fox News also edited out Trump praising authoritarian Hungarian leader Viktor Orban and a false claim about 50,000 migrants being “dumped” in Springfield, Ohio.
A Fox News spokeswoman defended the network’s practice saying the barbershop segments are pretaped and edited.
The Bronx edition ran for nearly an hour and was cut for time and clarity, the network told CNN.
Editing interviews due to time constraints and to provide better clarity for audiences is a common practice.
However, Trump and his allies have been accusing 60 minutes of engaging in a conspiracy to rig the election over this pretty mundane process in their interview with Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump even went as far as to accuse CBS of misleading the public and say the network should lose its broadcasting license.
In a letter to CBS demanding the release of the unedited transcript of Harris’ interview with 60 minutes, Trump’s lawyer Edward Andrew Paltzik claims that CBS has “intentionally misled the public by broadcasting a skillfully edited interview transcript … aimed at causing confusion among the electorate regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’s abilities, intelligence, and appeal.”
“News organizations such as CBS have a responsibility to accurately represent the truth of events, not distort an interview to try and make their preferred candidate appear coherent and decisive, which Harris most certainly is not,” Paltzik wrote. “Due to CBS’ actions, the public cannot distinguish which Kamala Harris they are seeing: the candidate or the puppet of a behind-the-scenes editor.”
“CBS deceived viewers into thinking Harris’ answer was, at the very least—as CBS put it—more ‘succinct’ than the word salad it actually was,” the letter adds.
“We therefore demand that you immediately provide and publicly release the full, unedited transcript of the 60 Minutes Interview with Kamala Harris.”
Lawyers for CBS News have denied the request telling the former president his demands are based on a “faulty premise.”
