Fox News Edits Down Trump Answers in Bronx Barbershop After Controversy Over 60 Minutes Harris Edits
Fox News edited down former President Donald Trump’s “rambling answers” in a Bronx barbershop interview, CNN reported Thursday.
The edits, made during an interview that aired on Fox & Friends, removed sections where the former president went off on tangents and made several “false” claims, CNN reported.
The new reporting comes hot on the heels of Trump’s attacks on CBS’ 60 Minutes for editing responses from its interview with Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month.
The Trump segments were part of Fox host Lawrence Jones’s ongoing series of barbershop interviews, featured Trump speaking with Black and Hispanic customers in the Bronx. However, as CNN discovered after reviewing the full, unedited video of the event, which aired live on Instagram on Friday, Fox had trimmed Trump’s comments down for the televised segment.
What appeared to be a polished Q&A on television, in reality, was far more meandering. In one instance, Trump veered off from a question about federal taxes into unrelated topics, including the Keystone Pipeline, Ronald Reagan, and transgender athletes. CNN reported it took seven minutes and several nudges from one audience member before Trump returned to the original question.
CNN reported that Fox’s televised segment omitted several of Trump’s off-script moments, including a false statement that 50,000 migrants had been “dumped” in Springfield, Ohio.
The timing of CNN’s hit is significant, as Trump and his supporters have loudly criticized CBS for what he claimed was a misleading edit of Harris’s comments on U.S.-Israel relations during her appearance on 60 Minutes. Trump demanded the full, uncut interview be released, accusing CBS of manipulating the footage to “make her look better.”
In the weeks since, Trump has continued to amplify the interview as a major scandal. On Monday on TruthSocial he said that CBS had “misled the public” and has also said that the network should lose its broadcasting license.
Fox News, of course, covered Trump’s accusations against CBS extensively. According to a transcript search by Mediaite, 60 Minutes was mentioned 434 times on Fox News in the past three weeks. Notably, Fox & Friends largely avoided discussing the Trump-CBS throwdown.
As Mediaite founding editor Colby Hall pointed out on NewsNation two weeks ago, these editing decisions are standard practice in television news post-production to the benefit of audiences within the medium’s time constraints and for clarity.
Hall explained how Trump’s attacks constituted a double standard on his part since he’d “done dozens of taped interviews with Fox News, all of which have also been edited for concision.”
Yet, the mundane revelation of rote production processes at network television has become fodder for a seemingly endless game of partisan sniping.
CNN’s Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly, who share a byline on the story, argued that Fox engaged in the same type of editing, noting that “some of the edits certainly make [Trump] look better.” And with the shoe on the other foot, liberal commentators like MSNBC contributor Sam Stein asked mockingly, and not seriously, whether Fox should now “lose its broadcasting license.”
CNN’s investigation clearly attempts to point out flaws in Trump’s attack on CBS by spotlighting the same practices at a right-leaning network.
