CBS, only a month before a Presidential election that was believed to be a toss-up, deliberately used its flagship news magazine show, “60 Minutes,” to throw a lifeline to Kamala Harris. The network was caught red-handed at this, as this admittedly critical coverage clearly shows…

Not long after CBS’s flagrant attempt at election interference, NBC did its own dirty work, deliberately violating the FCC’s Equal Time regulation to allow Kamala Harris the equivalent of a campaign ad on Saturday Night Live just three days before the election.

In response to CBS’s cheat, Trump sued the network last year for $10 billion, “alleging” that “the network”60 Minutes” deceptively edited the featured interview with Harris to help her candidacy, or perhaps not to hurt her candidacy is more accurate, since it hid a typical Harris outbreak of gibberish in response to a straightforward question. The lawsuit alleges this because “60 Minutes” did deceptively edit the interview. There is no non-risible argument that it did not. Ethics Alarms issued two posts about this nauseating example of unethical partisan broadcast journalism, here and here. CBS could have backed up its “It isn’t what it is” defense of the incident by releasing the raw transcript of the Harris interview, but it would not, more smoking gun evidence of its attempted election interference by withholding that smoking gun.

The New York Times, another conspirator in the media effort to steal this Presidential election for their party like they attempted to steal the last one, wrote today, “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.’” What experts? Heavens, imagine punishing a news organization for presenting a false version of an interview that helps a Presidential candidate right before the election! Trump’s claims that CBS should lose its broadcasting license was more than a little hyperbolic, but the suit? Absolutely necessary to make sure another news organization didn’t cloak itself in the First Amendment to justify undermining democracy.

Now, four full months after the scandal, CBS has finally agreed to release the unedited transcript, which will, of course, show that CBS did exactly what they did. The network’s news division received a letter of inquiry last week from the FCC, now under new management, demanding “the full, unedited transcript and camera feeds” from the Harris interview. “We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do,” a CBS News spokesman said.

How’s this for partisan hackery? Anna Gomez, a Democratic FCC commissioner, said in a statement, “Let’s be clear. 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.” Yes, let’s be clear. This isn’t retaliation, it is accountability and deterrence. CBS was betting that Harris would win, and that its abuse of the public trust would then be ignored and even rewarded. The CBS coverage wasn’t “perceived” to be “unfavorable,” it was plainly rigged to avoid being unfavorable to Harris.

Now CBS is in settlement talks with Trump attorneys, and the development is being reported by the same media cabal that includes CBS, NBC and the Times as a member as a threat to the First Amendment. Nobody believes that the interview manipulation was innocent or accidental. Nobody believes that it wasn’t done with actual malice, either, or that the Harris campaign didn’t have any influence over it (Oh my God, another word salad! We can’t let that go on the air! Quick, call CBS…”) or that there aren’t plenty of emails and text messages between CBS, “60 Minutes” and Harris’s team marking the interview edit as a “Stop Trump” operation.

The Times is spinning it little heart out. “Many executives at Paramount believe that settling the suit could help pave the way for the F.C.C. to approve Paramount’s planned multi-billion-dollar merger with another company,” it says, suggesting that the settlement is really a payoff. Which executives believe that? What are their names? “Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, strongly supports the company’s effort to settle the lawsuit, the people said.” What “people”? “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.” “Perceived” again! You mean like perceiving that a broadcast news magazine deciding that it original cut of the Democratic Presidential candidate’s answer to a question on camera makes her sound like an idiot, so it edits the tape to make her sound better? How else could that be perceived?

By the end of the campaign, I had become convinced that a Trump victory was as important to foil the unethical, undemocratic efforts of the mainstream media to warp our politics, elections and institutions as for any other reason, and maybe more. CBS and “60 Minutes” should pay with their money, their reputation, and their status. There is no defending what they did.