Sen. Bernie Sanders raised the alarm about President Trump’s lawsuits against news organizations, including his $20 billion suit against CBS over a “60 Minutes” segment, on the latest episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast.
“I gotta say, I mean, one of the things — and there’s a lot of arguments about Trump — that worries me very, very much is this movement toward authoritarianism and [Trump] going after media, suing media,” Sanders said.
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The Vermont senator, a left-wing independent, cited Trump’s “60 Minutes” lawsuit, which Paramount and CBS have called “meritless” even as they are in settlement talks with the president’s legal team, as well as his defamation lawsuit against ABC News and George Stephanopoulos (which Disney agreed to settle by paying Trump $16 million) and Trump’s suit against the Des Moines Register over polling figures that showed him trailing Kamala Harris.
Rogan — who endorsed Trump in the 2024 election — asked Sanders about the CBS case, which involved alleged deceptive editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris, “Don’t you think there’s a real issue with what they did?” Sanders replied, “No.”
Rogan pressed the issue: “You don’t think that there’s a real issue in editing conversations to give someone an answer different than what they really answered?” Sanders replied, “Joe, I’ve been on 8 zillion shows, right, in my life, okay? Now, should I sue you if you ask me some stupid question that I don’t like?”
After Sanders cited the investigative-reporting legacy of “60 Minutes,” Rogan countered that CBS’s editing of the Harris interview “to make it look more precise” was “not investigative journalism… if you ask her a question and she comes with a rambling answer that doesn’t make sense and you edit that out and insert another answer to a different question that seems more cogent.” (CBS did not “insert another answer to a different question” with the Harris interview; it presented different portions of her answer to the same question, as detailed below.)
Sanders told Rogan, “You’re walking down a dangerous path. Suing media has the impact of intimidating media, all right… You could be sued tomorrow, right, because you are doing this, you’re too sympathetic to this, and Joe you did that and they have a big law firm behind [them] and you’re going to have to spend zillions of dollars defending yourself. You know what? Next time you do an interview you say, ‘Maybe I’m not going to go in that area.’”
The senator continued, “If I were to sue everybody who said things that were factually incorrect about me, I’d be suing people zillions of times. But Joe what you’re saying is, Does media get it wrong sometimes? Absolutely. Should you have the most powerful person in America suing media, what is the impact of that? The impact is clearly intimidation.”
Sanders also brought up the issue of Trump’s desire to defund public broadcasting, which he said is “part of a pattern that says, ‘Hey, I got the power, don’t you criticize me, you criticize me, I’m gonna sue you.’ So it’s not whether this show was right or wrong.”
Sanders was among a group of U.S. senators who last month urged Paramount Global controlling shareholder Shari Redstone to not settle Trump’s “bogus” lawsuit. He also cosigned a letter to Redstone warning her that Paramount could be liable for violating a federal anti-bribery law if the company paid Trump to settle the suit.
Paramount’s $8 billion deal to merge with David Ellison’s Skydance Media is in limbo, as it is currently awaiting approval by the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chairman Brendan Carr. Last week, when Trump was asked what was holding up the Paramount-Skydance deal, immediately began discussing his “60 Minutes” lawsuit.
On Rogan’s show, Sanders said, “The president sues you, what do you think you’re going to do? You’re going to settle the lawsuit, give him millions of dollars and get your merger approved, all right… We want honesty in media but all I can tell you is that the way to respond to the lies which take place every day is to take them on — not to intimidate media.”
For the record, here is the unedited portion of the “60 Minutes” exchange, as released by CBS, that Trump’s lawsuit takes issue with. (Trump has claimed the edit made Harris appear “more presidential”; the lawsuit asserts that CBS violated a Texas consumer-protection law by confusing viewers and that the broadcaster’s actions also represented unfair competition with Trump’s media businesses). During the interview, “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Harris, “Does the U.S. have no sway over [Israeli] Prime Minister Netanyahu?” and then asked this follow-up question:
WHITAKER: But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening. “The Wall Street Journal” said that he — that your administration has repeatedly been blindsided by Netanyahu, and in fact, he has rebuffed just about all of your administration’s entreaties.
HARRIS: Well, Bill, the work that we have done 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. And we’re not going to stop doing that. 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.
On the Oct. 6 edition of “Face the Nation,” that exchange was edited to this:
WHITAKER: But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.
HARRIS: Well, Bill, the work that we have done 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.
On the “60 Minutes” segment that aired Oct. 7, the interaction was edited to this:
Whitaker: But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.
Harris: 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.
Watch a clip of the discussion between Sanders and Rogan:
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