If the Democratic party retained me for communications advice on how best to defeat Donald Trump, my urgent counsel would be for Kamala Harris to order her legacy media myrmidons to immediately cease doing interviews with JD Vance. Say what you want about Vance and his policies, the guy is wicked smart and America’s broadcast news personalities neither have the intellect nor the disarming charm required to take him on. The results aren’t pretty for anchors looking to forward their agendas at Vance’s expense.
A representative example is the accompanying interview CNN’s Dana Bash conducted with Vance after the presidential debates, which I encourage you to watch. Bash insinuated that Vance’s claims about Haitian migrants eating the pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio, were responsible for area hospitals receiving bomb threats and a brigade of 12 Proud Boys marching through town, and she badgered Vance to concede her point. Vance refused, instead saying he wanted to focus on the public health and other crisis issues resulting from 20,000 Haitian migrants being resettled in an already impoverished city of 60,000 people.
The legacy media took great delight reporting that Ohio governor Mike DeWine said that it wasn’t true that Haitian migrants were eating the pets of Springfield’s residents, salivating that DeWine is a Republican. The legacy media understandably ignored the thrust of the news release DeWine issued about the scope of the Springfield crisis and who was responsible for it.
“The federal government needs to assist these communities with funding because these dramatic migrant surges impact every citizen in the community — the moms who have to wait hours in a waiting room with a sick child, everyone who drives on our streets, and the children who go to school in more crowded classrooms,” said DeWine, whose Buckeye State is a parallel universe to Gretchen Whitmer’s Michigan. “The federal government does not have a plan to give any support to the communities impacted by surges, and we have absolutely no indication that a plan is coming in the near future.”
As for the bomb threats Bash was so worried about, DeWine subsequently revealed they were all hoaxes, with some originating from “one particular country” overseas. Not surprisingly, the legacy media wasn’t all that diligent about setting the record straight.
Vance, for whom engaging enemy journalists likely seems a walk in the park compared to the conditions he endured in Iraq as a Marine war correspondent, has been swatting down smug broadcast anchors with increasing regularity. This past weekend, Vance made mincemeat out of ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz, while impressively confronting New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
Legacy media journalists, particularly the TV kind, are too arrogant and self absorbed to care how the public perceives them, but it’s undeniable Americans hold them in low regard. Gallup every year releases an annual survey ranking the American public’s faith in U.S. institutions. The 2024 survey was released in July, and it comes as no surprise that Congress ranked at the bottom, with only nine percent of Americans having a great deal or quite a lot of trust in the government body.
The penultimate institution commanding the least amount of the public’s trust? That would be television news, which only 12% of Americans significantly trust.
An industry whose success is predicated on being perceived as trustworthy ranking as not much more credible than Congress is failing miserably. CBS News far and away is leading the race to the bottom.
The network’s once venerable 60 Minutes is under fire for what appears to be a deceptive edit that cleaned up Kamala Harris’s signature word salad response about whether Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was listening to the Biden-Harris administration.
“The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” is how Harris answered the question in a teaser clip CBS News featured on its Sunday Face the Nation broadcast. Harris’s response was immediately mocked on social media.
But when 60 Minutes aired its Harris interview, her response was reasonably intelligent.
“We’re not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris said in the edited version of the broadcast.
CBS so far has refused to heed calls to release an unedited transcript of its Kamala Harris interview, which would reveal some other liberties that 60 Minutes possibly took to clean up Harris’s other muddled responses. As former FOX anchor Megyn Kelly noted on her podcast: “They used to call 60 Minutes in the age of Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley ‘murderers’ row’ because they would crush you. It was scary to go on there. Liars would be exposed. No politician was spared because they cared more about the reputation of 60 Minutes as a hard-hitting journalistic outfit than they did about promoting somebody’s candidacy.”
The Harris campaign understandably declined The Free Press’s request for an unedited copy of the transcript, which it no doubt has.
“When 60 Minutes appears to mislead its viewers in order to protect a presidential candidate less than a month before an election, then they may as well just call her daddy,” The Free Press said in a commentary, which I’m guessing was a reference to the controversial Call Her Daddy podcast Harris appeared on that’s best known for its instructional discussion on the finer points of oral sex.
CBS, dubbed The Tiffany Network for its superior programming and quality journalism during the 60 years founder William Paley ran the place, is also under fire for its public rebuking of CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil for his critical interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a journalist and author known primarily for writing on race, who is flogging his new book, The Message.
The book contains three essays, one of them a one-sided anti-Israel diatribe that’s clearly intended to fuel more animosity towards Israel, a growing trend that Dokoupil might feel a tad touchy about these days. Dokoupil converted to Judaism and his former wife and children live in Israel, possibly taking refuge in bomb shelters from terrorist Hezbollah missiles launched from neighboring Lebanon and aimed at civilian centers.
Here’s a sampling of questions that landed Dokoupil in trouble with CBS News’s management and some of his colleagues, ones that former 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace might have regarded as overly deferential.
“I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away – the content of that section [on Israel] would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil said.
“So then I found myself wondering: Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates… leave out so much?” Dokoupil asked Coates. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”
The Free Press reported that during a CBS editorial meeting last week, the network’s senior officials “all but apologized for the interview to staff.” Adrienne Roark, who oversees newsgathering for CBS News and its stations, reportedly said: “We will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door.”
CBS News leaving its “biases and opinions at the door” – that’s rich. The Free Press also reported that Mark Memmott, the network’s senior director of news “standards,” in late August sent an email to all CBS News employees admonishing them to not mention that Jerusalem is in Israel.
“Yes, the U.S. embassy is there and the Trump administration recognized it as being Israel’s capital,” wrote Memmott, who previously worked at NPR and Gannett’s ailing USA Today. “But its status is disputed. The status of Jerusalem goes to the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards Jerusalem as its ‘eternal and undivided’ capital, while the Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”
CBS News’s latest disgraces come in wake of the network’s ignoble firing of Catherine Herridge, an investigative reporter specializing in national security issues. Herridge was one of 20 CBS journalists who were let go earlier this year as part of a bloodbath of 800 employees discarded by the network’s corporate parent Paramount, which also owns MTV, Paramount Pictures, and Comedy Central.
Herridge was known for her tenacious reporting on Hunter Biden and the Biden family interests, and when CBS fired her Joe Biden hadn’t yet been shunted aside in a coup staged by Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic party elders. CBS News’s treatment of Herridge was despicable; the network boxed up all Herridge’s personal belongings except for her computer, notes, and files and informed her that it would decide what — if anything — would be returned to her.
The New York Post reported that Herridge clashed with CBS News President Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews, who insiders accused of promoting minorities while unfairly sidelining white journalists. The Post said Dominican-born Ciprián-Matthews, the top-ranked woman of color at CBS News, was cleared of wrongdoing in an internal probe that was inexplicably cut short. An investigator simply deemed Ciprián-Matthews a “bad manager” with limited resources.
Ciprián-Matthews abruptly stepped down as president of CBS News in July, ostensibly because of Paramount’s expected $28 billion merger with Hollywood production studio Skydance Media. Wendy McMahon, chief executive of CBS News and Stations, said in a staff memo that Ciprián-Matthews would move into a newly created role as senior editorial adviser helping to guide the network’s political coverage.
CBS News’s management next year may be served their just desserts. Charlie Gasparino, a New York Post columnist and author of the Starkman Approved book, Go Woke Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America, reported this past Saturday that the owners of Skydance are mulling “blowing the place up” once they take control of the network.
Exactly what that means isn’t clear, but Gasparino notes that billionaire and Oracle founder Larry Ellison is funding much of Skydance’s Paramount acquisition. Skydance is run by Ellison’s son, David, the movie producer of “Top Gun: Maverick” fame.
Ellison is one of the world’s richest men, and Gasparino says he’s one of the most pro-Israel executives in corporate America and “buds” with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. Ellison has donated to many Israeli causes, and Oracle, like most major tech companies, has operations in Israel. The Jerusalem Post earlier this month ranked Ellison among the world’s 50 most influential Jews.
Unlike the cowardice of its tech rivals that have expressed little, if any, support for their Israeli employees, Oracle has doubled down on its support for the embattled country. Three months after Oct. 7, Oracle announced it would open a second underground public cloud center, doubling its investment in the country.
“We are here to help the government, the military and the Israeli economy,” said CEO Safra Catz, who was born in Israel and typically keeps a low profile, despite unquestionably ranking among America’s most impressive chief executives and a self-made multibillionaire.
Ellison, whose adoptive parents reportedly raised him Jewish but is a religious skeptic who refused to have a Bar Mitzvah, is said to love Israel because of its technology entrepreneurship. Gasparino said that Skydance executives and the Ellisons read the newspapers, and he knows “for a fact” the pro-Israel New York Post is among the news sources they rely on.
If Skydance succeeds with its Paramount acquisition, let’s hope the company’s leaders find this Wall Street Journal story about the growing stature of TikTok political news influencers, including Vitus “V” Spehars whose @underthedesknews” account has more than 3 million followers, topping mainstream news outlets such as CBS, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The Times dubbed Spehars “GenZ’s Walter Cronkite.”
That Spehars single-handedly commands a following rivaling the audiences of America’s major networks should serve as a wakeup call that America’s TV anchors and producers are grossly overpaid for their subpar audience attraction achievements. Let’s hope the blowing up of CBS News serves as a watershed moment in U.S. journalism, and a broom is subsequently taken to the managements of America’s other corporate owned broadcast networks.