Business

CBS posts full transcript, video of Trump interview with ’60 Minutes,’ prompting outcry over edits left on cutting room floor

Published

3 months ago

November 4, 2025

During his “60 Minutes” interview, President Donald Trump called Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer a “kamikaze,” complained about investigators searching through his wife’s closet, spoke in detail about ending wars and turned the tables on interviewer Norah O’Donnell to ask about safety in Washington, D.C.

None of that was seen by people who watched the CBS telecast Sunday night.

Less than half of O’Donnell’s interview, conducted Friday, actually made it onto the air. But CBS posted a transcript and video of the full 73-minute discussion online, so viewers could see for themselves what the president said that the network deemed worthy for inclusion in the 28-minute on-air segment.

That offered viewers a rare look inside the editing process at one of journalism’s best-known institutions, showing the dozens of decisions on clarity and newsworthiness that go into telling the story you see on television.

Beyond “60 Minutes,” the process is essentially the same throughout the world of journalism, from local newspapers to The New York Times, from specialty websites to The Associated Press. In short: Much like the old notion that everyone’s a critic, with this move everyone can be an editor.

A contrast to how ‘60 Minutes’ has worked throughout its history

Release of the Trump “outtakes” contrasted with CBS’ treatment of the “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris last fall. Trump sued CBS, claiming the interview with his Democratic opponent was deceptively edited, based on two different clips that were aired on the newsmagazine and “Face the Nation.”

CBS did not release a transcript of its Harris interview for four months, and not until the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission had applied public pressure. On a routine basis, “60 Minutes” — and most journalists — don’t release raw material in this way.

If CBS News is going to change its practices routinely in the future, one former “60 Minutes” producer said it should be up front with its viewers about it. Tom Bettag, who worked at the broadcast in the 1980s and is now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, said it’s a product of the times in which we live, but there’s a downside to the practice of letting people in on the editing.

“I think there’s a very good reason not to allow people to do that, in order to avoid the arguments of ‘you should have done this’ or ‘you should have done that,’” Bettag said. “The assumption has been that your audience trusts you to use good judgment and to be fair.”

From the very start, the edited Trump interview showed a clear difference from the raw material. On the broadcast, O’Donnell’s interview began with discussion of the government shutdown. But when the two actually sat down, she started by asking the president about his just-concluded meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

That’s essentially a call journalists make every day in crafting reports: Pick material to emphasize that seems the most newsworthy, or of interest to the most people.

“The newsiest portions made the broadcast, which is why programs edit in the first place,” Brian Stelter wrote about the “60 Minutes” interview for CNN’s “Reliable Sources” newsletter.

The first words out of Trump’s mouth — “Democrats’ fault” — came before O’Donnell even completed her question. That clearly showed where Trump was going, and the broadcast interview reflected that. But it was edited several times for length, to avoid tangents and the repetitiveness of partisan attacks.

Of Schumer, Trump said, “He would rather see the country fail than have Trump and the Republicans do well” — a comment left out of the broadcast.

On cutting room floor: Trump says O’Donnell ‘should be ashamed’

Trump also told O’Donnell that she “should be ashamed” to be asking him about political retribution. That was left off the broadcast. Trump’s complaints about New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey were abbreviated — although his comment that James was a “terrible, dishonest person” was left in.

“I was struck by how much of what didn’t air from the interview were the parts that seemed more rant-filled and often confusing,” wrote journalist Rick Ellis, who painstakingly compared transcripts of the full interview and what CBS broadcast for the website All Your Screens.

Trump brought up his predecessor, President Joe Biden, more than 40 times in the interview but only six instances made the broadcast, Ellis said. The headline for Ellis’ story read, “’60 Minutes’ Edits (Most of) the Crazy Out of Its Interview with Donald Trump.”

CBS edited a handful of fact-checks into the “60 Minutes” story, most notably adding a military official’s refutation of Trump’s claim that China and Russia were testing nuclear weapons. There were a handful of missed opportunities, such as Trump’s claim that he was able to beat all of the legal “nonsense that was thrown at me.”

CBS removed an exchange during a discussion of crime in cities in which Trump asked O’Donnell whether she felt safer in Washington, D.C., after the president ordered the National Guard to patrol there. Generally, journalists like to keep the focus off themselves.

“You see a difference?” Trump asked her.

Responded O’Donnell: “I think I’ve been working too hard. I haven’t been out and about that much.”

“60 Minutes” pointed out that O’Donnell’s interview was conducted exactly a year after Trump filed his lawsuit regarding the Harris interview. But it left out of the broadcast Trump’s discussion about management changes at CBS’ parent company Paramount since the company agreed to pay him $16 million to settle the case.

“They paid me a lot of money for that,” Trump said. “You can’t have fake news. You’ve gotta have legit news. And I think that’s happening.” He praised Paramount’s new leaders along with the news division’s new editor-in-chief, The Free Press founder Bari Weiss.

That editing decision angered a Trump critic, Tim Miller at the Bulwark website. “’60 Minutes’ did not air the part where Trump discusses his success extorting the network and calls them Fake News,” he wrote on X. “This edit is harmful to me and I’m considering suing.”

CBS’ editing seemed to draw fewer complaints from Trump supporters. The White House’s “rapid response” X feed posted copies of both the full interview and what CBS put on the air.

Jorge Bonilla, writing for the conservative media watchdog Newsbusters, wrote that O’Donnell’s first interview with the newsmagazine contrasted with its “debacle” with Lesley Stahl five years ago, when Trump walked out.

“It appears,” he wrote, “that the Bari Weiss era is now full upon us at CBS News.”

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Business

Palantir CEO says AI “will destroy” humanities jobs but there will be “more than enough jobs” for people with vocational training

Published

24 minutes ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Some economists and experts say that critical thinking and creativity will be more important than ever in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), when a robot can do much of the heavy lifting on coding or research. Take Benjamin Shiller, the Brandeis economics professor who recently told Fortune that a “weirdness premium” will be valued in the labor market of the future. Alex Karp, the Palantir founder and CEO, isn’t one of these voices.

“It will destroy humanities jobs,” Karp said when asked how AI will affect jobs in conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “You went to an elite school and you studied philosophy — I’ll use myself as an example — hopefully you have some other skill, that one is going to be hard to market.”

Karp attended Haverford College, a small, elite liberal arts college outside his hometown of Philadelphia. He earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Goethe University in Germany. He spoke about his own experience getting his first job.

Karp told Fink that he remembered thinking about his own career, “I’m not sure who’s going to give me my first job.”

The answer echoed past comments Karp has made about certain types of elite college graduates who lack specialized skills.

“If you are the kind of person that would’ve gone to Yale, classically high IQ, and you have generalized knowledge but it’s not specific, you’re effed,” Karp said in an interview with Axios in November.

Not every CEO agrees with Karp’s assessment that humanities degrees are doomed. BlackRock COO Robert Goldstein told Fortune in 2024 that the company was recruiting graduates who studied “things that have nothing to do with finance or technology.”

McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels recently said in an interview with Harvard Business Review that the company is “looking more at liberal arts majors, whom we had deprioritized, as potential sources of creativity,” to break out of AI’s linear problem-solving.

Karp has long been an advocate for vocational training over traditional college degrees. Last year, Palantir launched a Meritocracy Fellowship, offering high school students a paid internship with a chance to interview for a full-time position at the end of four months.

The company criticized American universities for “indoctrinating” students and having “opaque” admissions that “displaced meritocracy and excellence,” in their announcement of the fellowship.

“If you did not go to school, or you went to a school that’s not that great, or you went to Harvard or Princeton or Yale, once you come to Palantir, you’re a Palantirian—no one cares about the other stuff,” Karp said during a Q2 earnings call last year.

“I think we need different ways of testing aptitude,” Karp told Fink. He pointed to the former police officer who attended a junior college, who now manages the US Army’s MAVEN system, a Palantir-made AI tool that processes drone imagery and video.

“In the past, the way we tested for aptitude would not have fully exposed how irreplaceable that person’s talents are,” he said.

Karp also gave the example of technicians building batteries at a battery company, saying those workers are “very valuable if not irreplaceable because we can make them into something different than what they were very rapidly.”

He said what he does all day at Palantir is “figuring out what is someone’s outlier aptitude. Then, I’m putting them on that thing and trying to get them to stay on that thing and not on the five other things they think they’re great at.”

Karp’s comments come as more employers report a gap between the skills applicants are offering and what employers are looking for in a tough labor market. The unemployment rate for young workers ages 16 to 24 hit 10.4% in December and is growing among college graduates. Karp isn’t too worried.

“There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training,” he said.

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Business

AI is boosting productivity. Here’s why some workers feel a sense of loss

Published

55 minutes ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition…Why some workers feel a sense of loss while AI boosts productivity…Anthropic raising fresh $10 Billion at $350 billion valuation…Musk’s xAI closed $20 billion funding with Nvidia backing…Can AI do your job? See the results from hundreds of tests.

For months, software developers have been giddy with excitement over “vibe coding”– prompting desired software functions or features in natural language—with the latest AI code generation tools. Anthropic’s Claude Code is the darling of the moment, but OpenAI’s Codex, Cursor and other tools have also led engineers to flood social media with examples of tasks that used to take days and are now finished in minutes.

Even veteran software design leaders have marvelled at the shift. “In just a few months, Claude Code has pushed the state of the art in software engineering further than 75 years of academic research,” said Erik Meijer, a former senior engineering leader at Meta.

Skills honed seem less essential

However, that same delight has turned disorienting for many developers, who are grappling with a sense of loss as skills honed over a lifetime suddenly seem less essential. The feeling of flow—of being “in the zone”—seems to have vanished as building software becomes an exercise in supervising AI tools rather than writing code.

In a blog post this week titled “The Grief When AI Writes All the Code,” Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer, wrote that he is “coming to terms with the high probability that AI will write most of my code which I ship to production.” It already does it faster, he explained, and for languages and frameworks he is less familiar with, it does a better job.

“It feels like something valuable is being taken away, and suddenly,” he wrote. “It took a lot of effort to get good at coding and to learn how to write code that works, to read and understand complex code, and to debug and fix when code doesn’t work as it should.”

Andrew Duca, founder of tax software Awaken Tax, wrote a similar post this week that went viral, saying that he was feeling “kinda depressed” even though he finds using Claude Code “incredible” and has “never found coding more fun.”

He can now solve customer problems faster, and ship more features, but at the same time “the skill I spent 10,000s of hours getting good at…is becoming a full commodity extremely quickly,” he wrote. “There’s something disheartening about the thing you spent most of your life getting good at now being mostly useless.”

Software development has long been on the front lines of the AI shift, partly because there are decades of code, documentation and public problem-solving (from sites like GitHub) available online for AI models to train on. Coding also has clear rules and fast feedback – it runs or it doesn’t – so AI systems can easily learn how to generate useful responses. That means programming has become one of the first white-collar professions to feel AI’s impact so directly.

These tensions will affect many professions

These tensions, however, won’t be confined to software developers. White-collar workers across industries will ultimately have to grapple with them in one way or another. Media headlines often focus on the possibility of mass layoffs driven by AI; the more immediate issue may be how AI reshapes how people feel about their work. AI tools can move us past the hardest parts of our jobs more quickly—but what if that struggle is part of what allows us to take pride in what we do? What if the most human elements of work—thinking, strategizing, working through problems—are quietly sidelined by tools that prize speed and efficiency over experience?

Of course, there are plenty of jobs and workflows where most people are very happy to use AI to say buh-bye to repetitive grunt work that they never wanted to do in the first place. And as Duca said, we can marvel at the incredible power of the latest AI models and leap to use the newest features even while we feel unmoored.

Many white-collar workers will likely face a philosophical reckoning about what AI means for their profession—one that goes beyond fears of layoffs. It may resemble the familiar stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, eventually, acceptance. That acceptance could mean learning how to be the best manager or steerer of AI possible. Or it could mean deliberately carving out space for work done without AI at all. After all, few people want to lose their thinking self entirely.

Or it could mean doing what Erik Meijer is doing. Now that coding increasingly feels like management, he said, he has turned back to making music—using real instruments—as a hobby, simply “to experience that flow.”

With that, here’s more AI news.

Sharon Goldman
sharon.goldman@fortune.com
@sharongoldman

FORTUNE ON AI

As Utah gives the AI power to prescribe some drugs, physicians warn of patient risks – by Beatrice Nolan

Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides linked to AI chatbots – by Beatrice Nolan

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health in a push to become a hub for personal health data – by Sharon Goldman

Google takes first steps toward an AI product that can actually tackle your email inbox – by Jacqueline Munis

Fusion power nearly ready for prime time as Commonwealth builds first pilot for limitless, clean energy with AI help from Siemens, Nvidia – by Jordan Blum

AI IN THE NEWS

Anthropic raising fresh $10 Billion at $350 billion valuation. According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI rival Anthropic is planning to raise $10 billion at a roughly $350 billion valuation, nearly doubling its worth from just four months ago. The round is expected to be led by GIC and Coatue Management, following a $13 billion raise in September that valued the company at $183 billion. The financing underscores the continued boom in AI funding—AI startups raised a record $222 billion in 2025, per PitchBook—and comes as Anthropic is also preparing for a potential IPO this year. Founded in 2021 by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has become a major OpenAI rival, buoyed by Claude’s popularity with business users, major backing from Nvidia and Microsoft, and expectations that it will reach break-even by 2028—potentially faster than OpenAI, which is itself reportedly seeking to raise up to $100 billion at a $750 billion valuation.

Musk’s xAI closed $20 billion funding with Nvidia backing. Bloomberg reported that xAI, the AI startup founded by Elon Musk, has completed a $20 billion funding round backed by investors including Nvidia, Valor Equity Partners, and the Qatar Investment Authority, underscoring the continued flood of capital into AI infrastructure. Other backers include Fidelity Management & Research, StepStone Group, MGX, Baron Capital Group, and Cisco’s investment arm. The financing—months in the making—will fund xAI’s rapid infrastructure buildout and product development, the company said, and includes a novel structure in which a large portion of the capital is tied to a special-purpose vehicle used to buy Nvidia GPUs that are then rented out, allowing investors to recoup returns over time. The deal comes as xAI has been under fire for its chatbot Grok producing non-consensual “undressing” images of real people.

Can AI do your job? See the results from hundreds of tests. I wanted to shout-out this fascinating new interactive feature in the Washington Post, which presented a new study that found that despite fears of mass job displacement, today’s AI systems are still far from being able to replace humans on real-world work. Researchers from Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety tested leading models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic on hundreds of actual freelance projects—from graphic design and creating dashboards to 3D modeling and games—and found that the best AI systems successfully completed just 2.5% of tasks on their own. While AI often produced outputs that looked plausible at first glance, closer inspection revealed missing details, visual errors, incomplete work, or basic technical failures, highlighting gaps in areas like visual reasoning, long-term memory, and the ability to evaluate subjective outcomes. The findings challenge predictions that AI is poised to automate large swaths of human labor anytime soon, even as newer models show incremental improvement and the economics of cheaper, semi-autonomous AI work continue to put pressure on remote and contract workers.

EYE ON AI NUMBERS

91.8%

That’s the percentage of Meta employees who admitted to not using the company’s AI chatbot, Meta AI, in their day-to-day work, according to new data from Blind, a popular anonymous professional social network.

According to a survey of 400 Meta employees, only 8.2% said they use Meta AI. The most popular chatbot was Anthropic’s Claude, used by more than half (50.7%) of Meta employees surveyed. 17.7% said they use Google’s Gemini and 13.7% said they used OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

When approached for comment, Meta spokesperson pointed out that the number (400 of 77,000+ employees) is “not even a half percent of our total employee population.”

AI CALENDAR

Jan. 19-23: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland.

Jan. 20-27: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Singapore.

Feb. 10-11: AI Action Summit, New Delhi, India.

March 2-5: Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain.

March 16-19: Nvidia GTC, San Jose, Calif.

April 6-9: HumanX, San Francisco.

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Business

Trust has become the crisis CEOs can’t ignore at Davos, as new data show 70% of people turning more ‘insular’

Published

1 hour ago

January 20, 2026

Jace Porter

Everywhere you turn in Davos this year, people are talking about trust. And there’s no one who knows trust better than Richard Edelman. Back in 1999, Edelman was on the cusp of taking over the PR firm founded by his father Daniel. Spurred by the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, he decided to try and measure the level of trust in NGOs compared with business, government and media, Edelman surveyed 1,300 thought leaders in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia, and the Edelman Trust Barometer was born.

While the survey sample long ago expanded beyond elites to include about 34,000 respondents in 28 nations, its results are still unveiled and debated every year at the ultimate gathering of elites: the World Economic Forum. This year’s findings are grim: About 70% of respondents now have an “insular” mindset: they don’t want to talk to, work for, or even be in the same space with anyone who doesn’t share their world view. And “a sense of grievance” permeates the business world, Edelman finds. At Davos, debating such findings have spawned a series of dinners, panels, cocktails and media briefings on site. What better place to bring people together than the world’s most potent village green?

I moderated a CEO salon dinner with about three dozen leaders last night to discuss what they’re seeing and doing when it comes to building trust. Before the dinner, I asked Edelman what he’d like to see this year, after 26 winters of highlighting the erosion of trust. “Urgency,” he said. “A sense that time is running out.”

Because the gathering itself was held under the Chatham House rule, I won’t share names and direct quotes. But the focus was on how attendees are trying to address the problem through what Edelman calls “trust brokering,” or finding common ground through practices from nonjudgemental communications to “polynational’ business models that invest in long-term local relationships. (See the report for more information.) There were some success stories from the front lines of college campuses, politics and industries caught in a crossfire of misinformation.

Still, the mood was somewhat subdued, with a sense that there’s no easy fix to building trust. As one CEO pointed out, rarely have leaders faced such a confluence of geopolitical crises, tech shifts, economic divides, disinformation, job disruption and wicked problems. And as much as Davos is a great gathering ground to talk through all of these problems, the fact is the problems will all still be waiting once these CEOs return from the mountains.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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