The 60 Minutes interview that reignited political tensions and spurred a massive lawsuit from President Donald Trump has now been nominated for an Emmy. The Television Academy announced the nominees for the 46th News & Documentary Emmy Awards on Thursday, and CBS’s primetime special featuring former Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz received a nod in the Outstanding Edited Interview category.
This recognition comes despite ongoing controversy surrounding the broadcast. The Harris-Walz interview aired just before the 2024 presidential election and quickly became the focus of a fiery legal battle. Trump, who is now 78, has accused CBS News and its parent company, Paramount Global, of editing the interview in a way that unfairly benefited Democrats in the final days of the campaign.
Kamala Harris Fuels Emmy Dreams Via Her Documentary
In a lawsuit initially filed for $10 billion and later raised to $20 billion, Trump claims that CBS’s editing constituted election interference. Filed just days before the November 2024 election, the lawsuit alleges that CBS News violated Texas consumer protection laws by deceptively altering Harris’s responses.
On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump responded to the Emmy nomination with renewed outrage. “The case we have against 60 Minutes, CBS, and Paramount is a true WINNER,” he wrote. “They cheated and defrauded the American People at levels never seen before in the Political Arena.”
In his online statement, Trump elaborated on his claims, alleging that “60 Minutes and its corporate parents, in order that this not have a negative impact on her, removed and deleted Kamala’s entire answer, every word of it, and replaced it with a response that she gave later on to an entirely different question.” He went so far as to accuse the program of committing a “Giant FRAUD against the American People, the Federal Elections Commission, and the Federal Communications System.”
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung also weighed in on the nomination in an interview with Fox News Digital, saying, “Of course it’s nominated for best editing because it takes some serious talent to edit Kamala’s answer into something that’s coherent and understandable, which in the end they still failed to do.”
Despite these claims, CBS and Paramount have firmly denied any wrongdoing. In a public statement, CBS defended the integrity of the broadcast, calling the allegations “false.” “Trump is accusing 60 Minutes of deceitful editing of our Oct. 7 interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. That is false,” the network said.
Further pushing back on the lawsuit, CBS and Paramount described the legal action as “an affront to the First Amendment” and said it was “without basis in law or fact.”
The Harris interview is not the only piece of journalism earning accolades for CBS. The network also received Emmy nominations for other major interviews, including those with Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and the late Pope Francis. Other contenders in the Outstanding Edited Interview category include NBC’s profile of singer Celine Dion and ABC’s sit-down with WNBA star Brittney Griner.
Even as the lawsuit looms and political tensions remain high, the Emmy nomination serves as an endorsement from the journalism community. However, the legal and political fallout shows no sign of slowing down. Trump continues to use the issue as a rallying cry against what he calls media bias and censorship, while CBS maintains its journalistic standards were upheld throughout the editing and airing of the controversial broadcast.
With an Emmy nomination now in the spotlight and a multi-billion dollar lawsuit still in motion, the 60 Minutes Harris interview has become one of the most polarizing media events of the past year—praised by peers, condemned by political opponents, and destined to remain a point of contention in the ongoing battle between press freedom and political accountability.
