Boss of network accused of favourably editing Kamala Harris interview donated to Democrats

Wendy McMahon donated $6,100 to Joe Biden’s campaign and Democratic fundraising platforms in 2020

The chief executive of CBS News donated more than $6,000 to Democrats, The Telegraph can reveal, amid accusations her network edited an interview with Kamala Harris to make her appear more coherent.
Donald Trump and his supporters have accused CBS of bias over its editing of Ms. Harris’s appearance on the 60 Minutes program.
Trump, who declined to be interviewed for the same program, said the network had chosen a better clip of Ms Harris in the full broadcast on Monday, cutting a less focused answer that aired in a preview on a separate show, Face the Nation, on Sunday night.
CBS has been accused of cutting the earlier answer after it was described as a vague “word salad” by Republicans.
The network has also been rocked by accusations of anti-Israel bias following its censure of a Jewish presenter over an interview he conducted with a pro-Palestinian academic.
Amid the controversies, The Telegraph can reveal that the network’s chief executive, Wendy McMahon, donated $6,100 to Mr Biden’s campaign and Democratic fundraising platforms in 2020.
Filings to the Federal Election Commission show the television executive, who was then working for rival ABC, donated to the campaign nine times in the final three months of the 2020 election.
They include two donations of $2,500 to the Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, an affiliated joint fundraising committee, and three donations to ActBlue, a fundraising platform for Democrats.
William Burton, Ms McMahon’s husband, donated $100 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2012.
George Cheeks, the chief executive of CBS, the overall network that includes CBS News, also donated hundreds of dollars to Mr Biden’s campaign and other Democrats in the 2020 election cycle.
CBS News employees are banned from making donations to political parties or campaigns to avoid the impression of bias, although Ms McMahon’s donations took place before she worked at the company.
The restriction on donations does not apply to Mr Cheeks, who does not work for the network’s news division.
Trump said on Thursday that the editing of Ms Harris’s interview was an “unprecedented scandal” and called for CBS’s broadcasting license to be revoked.
“Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better,” he wrote on Truth Social. “A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal.”
It is understood that Ms McMahon, who has led the network since 2021, was not directly involved in the interview edit.
In the first response, Ms Harris said: “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.”
Ms Harris was accused of failing to answer the question from host Bill Whitaker, who asked whether the US had “no sway” over Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions in Lebanon and Gaza.
However, the response did not appear in the full episode of 60 Minutes that aired the next day.
In that broadcast, Ms Harris said: “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.”
The Telegraph understands that the two clips used on Face the Nation and 60 Minutes were taken from the same full response, but that the decision to choose the more concise answer for the 60 Minutes broadcast was taken after the first clip had aired, by a different team.
Asked about the controversy on Wednesday, Ms Harris’s campaign said: “We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS.”
Jessica Rosenworcel, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, released a statement on Thursday calling Trump’s criticism of CBS a “threat to free speech.”
“The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees or dislikes content or coverage,” she said.
Meanwhile, CBS has become embroiled in an impartiality row after it criticized the work of its morning show host, who had challenged a guest on Israel’s right to exist.
The network said an interview between Tony Dokoupil, a news anchor, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, a pro-Palestinian author, had fallen short of its editorial standards.
In the interview, Mr Dokoupil said Mr Coates’s arguments “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and asked: “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?”
Network executives including Ms McMahon said on a staff call that the show had not met its standards, leading to accusations that Mr Dokoupil, who is Jewish, had been punished for asking questions that were deemed supportive of Israel.
Shari Redstone, the chairman of CBS’s parent company Paramount, said on Wednesday that it was a “mistake” for Mr Dokoupil to be rebuked for the interview. Speaking at Advertising Week in New York, she described it as a “model” of “civil discourse.”
Ruth Marcus, a commentator at the Washington Post, said it was “no accident that his supposed offense involved defending Israel.”
CBS was also previously criticized for firing reporter Catherine Herridge, who had spent time at the network investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop. Her sacking came amid wider layoffs in the business.
Sources told the New York Post that Ms Herridge encountered “roadblocks” from management at CBS over her coverage of the laptop, which contained emails with his father.
Although the data from the laptop was dismissed by some outlets as a Republican conspiracy theory or Russian disinformation, the emails later turned out to be real.
Other US media outlets have been accused of political bias in recent years.
In April, a senior editor at one of the biggest radio broadcasters in the US claimed it was ignoring major stories and losing its audience because of its management’s Left-wing diversity push.
Uri Berliner, a business editor at National Public Radio (NPR), said the organisation had moved away from reporting that “resembled America at large” to an activist stance that appealed to “a very small segment of the US population”.
As a result, it allegedly inflated stories damaging to Donald Trump while downplaying or ignoring others, including those on Hunter Biden, son of the US president Joe Biden, or the origin of the Covid-19 virus.