CBS News plans to comply with a request from the Federal Communications Commission for the unedited transcript of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris that aired last year and became the subject of a lawsuit brought against the network by President Trump.
The network’s news division received a letter of inquiry from the F.C.C., which is led by a Trump appointee, Brendan Carr, on Wednesday evening. The commission requested “the full, unedited transcript and camera feeds” from the interview with Ms. Harris, which aired on “60 Minutes” in October.
“We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do,” a CBS News spokesman said on Friday.
A spokesman for the F.C.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner at the agency, criticized the request in a statement. “Let’s be clear,” she wrote. “This is a retaliatory move by the government against broadcasters whose content or coverage is perceived to be unfavorable. It is designed to instill fear in broadcast stations and influence a network’s editorial decisions.”
Mr. Trump sued CBS last year for $10 billion and accused the network of deceptively editing the interview with Ms. Harris in a manner that benefited her candidacy. Many media law experts had dismissed the litigation as an idiosyncratic effort to punish a news outlet, and CBS called the lawsuit “completely without merit.”
But in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, has begun settlement discussions with representatives of Mr. Trump, according to several people with knowledge of the talks. Many executives at Paramount believe that settling the suit could help pave the way for the F.C.C. to approve Paramount’s planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company.
Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, strongly supports the company’s effort to settle the lawsuit, the people said.
The F.C.C. is an independent agency, though Mr. Carr, its chairman, has echoed many of the policy objectives of Mr. Trump. He has also promised to examine questions about the perceived political bias of certain news outlets.
“60 Minutes,” founded in 1968, is the country’s most popular news program and a cornerstone of CBS’s news division. Journalists at the network have privately expressed concern at the prospect of their corporate parent settling litigation that they believe is easily winnable in the courts.
CBS News had refused several requests by Mr. Trump last year to release a full transcript of the Harris interview, which aired during a special election episode of “60 Minutes” on Oct. 7. (Producers had also invited Mr. Trump to sit for an interview; his campaign ultimately declined to participate, and objected to CBS’s plans to fact-check his remarks.)
CBS aired a preview of the Harris interview in which Ms. Harris responded to a question from the correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Middle East. In a longer version of the interview that aired in prime-time the next night, Ms. Harris appeared to give a different, more concise response.
CBS said that Ms. Harris had given one lengthy answer to Mr. Whitaker, and its producers chose to air a different portion in prime-time because of time constraints. This type of editing is typical in the television news industry. CBS has said the interview “was not doctored.”
Cecilia Kang contributed reporting.
