Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee exposes how CBS News edited an interview

By Andrea Widburg | Am Thinker | August 10, 2025

Photo by U.S. Embassy Jerusalem – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikipedia

Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has essentially accused CBS News of leaving so much of an interview with him on the cutting room floor that it effectively changed the tenor of the interview. CBS News’s goal was obvious: To make Israel look genocidal and to make the Trump administration look either feckless or complicit.

Ambassador Huckabee in addition to making that point, proved it, by providing a link to the full transcript, which is available on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem:

CBS News’s pro-Hamas propaganda begins with the image that CBS elected to use for the video. You can see a small version of the image in Ambassador Huckabee’s tweet, and you can see a larger image on the interview page itself.

On one side of the image is a still of Ambassador Huckabee. On the other side is a photograph of plump, crying children waving bowls. Children who are experiencing a famine are not plump. Instead, they look more like Evyatar David, whom Hamas proudly showed starving in underground tunnels, with David being forced to dig his own grave:

That’s what starvation looks like.

Moreover, we know that, as often as not, those plump children are posing for the camera. Sometimes, Pallywood forgets to turn off the camera:

There’s also the fact that Bild, a German publication, revealed on August 5 that Anas Zayed Fteiha, who works for Turkish media, was staging these photographs. (And again, all the people waving their pots in the staged images are clearly well-fed.) I don’t know whether, two days after the Bild report emerged, CBS News used one of Fteiha’s photos, but it sure looks like his work.

Thus, the CBS News propaganda begins instantly, the moment you go to the landing page for the interview. But the real propaganda is how Huckabee’s interview has been edited. Of course, given that it was a long interview and CBS had only three-and-a-half minutes of airtime, the editors had to make cuts. But which cuts to make is a purely editorial choice, and what’s left on the cutting room floor is stunning.

Here is a complete transcript of the aired interview:

And here is a transcript of the full, unedited interview from the embassy website. I’ve made only two changes: I noted where the reporter interjected language that was not in the interview, and I highlighted in yellow every word that CBS News deleted from the final video:

Again, editing was inevitable and necessary. What was left behind is striking.

In the interview that aired, the reporter is importuning Huckabee to admit that

• people in Gaza are starving, and there’s massive evidence proving this,
• there’s no evidence Hamas is taking most of the food aid,
• Israel and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (“GHF”), a U.S. and Israeli-backed initiative, are failing to feed Gazans, and
• the IDF is slaughtering starving civilians, which is a war crime.

Per the aired interview, Huckabee’s response is to assure the reporter that all the suffering is Hamas’s fault (which is true), that he doubts reports about IDF slaughtering GHF recipients, and that Israel is bad at genocide and that, if its people are bad actors, it will prosecute them itself.

The impression one is left with is that terrible things are happening to Gaza civilians thanks to Israel, and that Huckabee either doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or is part of problem.

Here is just a small sampling, though, of what CBS News cut from Huckabee’s responses:

• Many of the photos out of Gaza—photos the American media is publishing—are fraudulent, such as the genetically ill child the NY Times claimed was a victim of famine, a starving child who was actually in Yemen, and the propaganda photos that Bild exposed.
• The UN has admitted that 87% of its food shipments are hijacked before reaching civilians, but the UN refuses to accept IDF protection for the shipments.
• While we know at least some of the famine images are faked, it’s a dead certainty that Hamas is starving Israelis, because it’s boasting about it.
• Two million tons of food have gone to Gaza, and Hamas is blocking the food from reaching civilians.
• Hamas made half a billion dollars last year selling donated food to civilians. The civilians who made it to GHF food sites said that this was the first time they weren’t forced to pay Hamas for the food.
• GHF has packaged food in a way that disincentivizes Hamas theft and resales.
• One of the claimed IDF massacres of 27 civilians at a food distribution site, which the Western media reported as true, was a hoax. Video of the scene proves it never happened. Although CBS News cut this fact from the interview, the reporter broke from the interview to inform the audience that IDF troops are slaughtering hundreds of people at food collection sites.
• Gazans to whom Huckabee has spoken do not hate the IDF, and they love Americans. However, they hate Hamas, because they have all lost family members to Hamas murders.
• That Israel is unique in world history in that it is feeding its enemy during a war.

That’s only some of what CBS News did not include in its aired Huckabee interview, but it gives you an idea of how CBS News is manipulating its audience.

People viewing the report think they’re hearing from Ambassador Mike Huckabee, but they’re not. Instead, they’re hearing carefully curated sentences that turn much of what he said on its head. Instead, the whole advances the propaganda narrative that Israel is a genocidal sinner and that Hamas and the people of Gaza are victims of a new Holocaust.

It’s disgusting. More than that, though, it’s a fraud on the American people and a libel against Israel. Congress needs to investigate the fraud, and the nation of Israel needs to sue for libel.