Happy Monday! Here's the latest on "60 Minutes," Tucker Carlson, YouTube TV, Kash Patel, Bluesky, "Ridiculousness," and much more...  |   
This morning, people are talking about President Trump's answers more than Norah O'Donnell's questions in the "60 Minutes" interview — and Bari Weiss, Tom Cibrowski and new "60 Minutes" boss Tanya Simon will count that as a win. 
  
Much of the post-interview media commentary is about the editing, since Trump infamously sued CBS over the editing of that Kamala Harris interview last year. 
  
"Maybe I should file a complaint with the FCC against the Trump White House for editing his unhinged '60 Minutes' interview," using "the exact same language Trump lodged against Vice President Harris," Senate minority leader 
Chuck Schumer remarked on X early this morning. 
  
The editing was by CBS, not by the White House, of course. About 28 minutes of the 90-minute interview aired on TV. Most of the rest was posted on YouTube. And the complete transcript was published on CBSNews.com.
 
  
The transcript contains at least a dozen follow-up story possibilities, from Trump saying "I'm not a Nazi" to O'Donnell dodging his loaded question about DC crime. However, the newsiest portions made the broadcast, which is why programs edit in the first place. 
  
O’Donnell sought to make the most of her time with Trump, pressing him on cost-of-living increases, foreign policy challenges, the government shutdown and other topics. Trump's response to O'Donnell's question about his pardon of former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao — "I don't know who he is" — is ricocheting around social media.
 
  
Here's my overnight analysis for CNN.com. Let's dig into a few specifics... 
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Can 'sanewashing' be avoided?  |   
In-depth interviews with Trump are few and far between, so Sunday night's broadcast reprised a decade-old debate among media insiders about how to handle Trump interviews. O'Donnell largely employed the let-him-talk approach, only interjecting at key moments. "Her interview style wasn't disrespectful, but it was fair and, more importantly, direct and tough," Poynter's Tom Jones wrote.
 
  
O'Donnell asked pointed questions and generated lots of news. "IMO, O'Donnell did better job than most on TV, of persistently trying to lasso Trump back toward realm of fact. And not smiling at his 'witticisms,'" James Fallows wrote on Bluesky. But others disagreed: "Norah let Trump lie and lie with barely any pushback or provision of corrective facts," 
Joy Reid complained. 
  
Some critics called it another instance of "sanewashing," a term that gained traction last year. HuffPost's S.V. Date wrote on X: "For those who watched what aired on 60 Minutes, you got a sanitized, sane-washed Donald Trump. If you want to hear what he's REALLY like, I urge you — read the full transcript, watch the full video."
 
  
Rick Ellis of All Your Screens painstakingly compared the TV broadcast to the raw transcript and flagged all the differences here. The portions CBS trimmed for time "seemed more rant-filled and often confusing," Ellis wrote. 
  
For example, Trump brought up (and bashed) Joe Biden 40-plus times during the interview, even though Trump has been in office for almost a year. Only 6 of those mentions made the TV broadcast.  
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Trump paints Weiss as an ally  |   
This part didn't make TV either: Toward the end of the interview, Trump brought up the Paramount payoff that Stephen Colbert likened to a "big fat bribe" (just before his show was cancelled) last summer. He misstated the timeline of the Harris interview, claiming it "was election-changing, two nights before the election,” when, in fact, it aired one month before election day. (CNN's Daniel Dale is working on a longer fact-check about Trump's falsehoods in the interview.) 
  All of that was a precursor to the really interesting part: Trump's flattery of David Ellison and Bari Weiss. "The young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great — from what I know," he said. "I don't know her, but I hear she’s a great person."
  
He continued, "I see good things happening in the news. I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership. I think it's the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press." 
  
 >> On "CNN This Morning," Audie Cornish said "it showed he sensed he was sitting down with a friendly news organization. That was the tone that he seemed to convey. Not them, but him." 
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Record disapproval # for Trump  |   
Trump's power grabs and propaganda videos sometimes disguise the fact that he remains remarkably unpopular. Take a look at CNN's homepage headline right now: "Trump's approval rating hits new low for second term."
  
In this new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, "his disapproval rating, at 63%, is numerically the highest of either term, one point above the previous high of 62% as he was leaving office in January 2021."   |   
ICYMI: Trump WH limits press access  |   
This had the feel of a Friday night news dump — "Trump administration restricts reporters' access to White House press secretary's office" — so I want to bring it up again at the start of this new workweek.  
  
Veteran media reporter Paul Farhi framed the matter this way: "White House bans White press from, yes, White House press offices." Obama confidant Eric Schultz, a former deputy WH press secretary, responded and said there hasn't been sufficient attention or outcry about it. "Reporters flipped out more when Obama golfed with Tiger Woods and we didn't offer a pool spray," Schultz remarked...
 
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'The new right's new antisemites'  |   
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