CBS: from the Tiffany Network to the cheap discount bin

Once upon a time, in a land faraway, CBS was called the “Tiffany Network.” The network’s glittering jewel was its news division. This is the story of that division’s decline and fall, driven by partisan goals and leftist ideology.

CBS News gained its fame in the 1940s, under the leadership of Edward R. Murrow, who not only painted a vivid word-picture of London during the Blitz, but also recruited the best broadcast journalists in the business. For decades, they formed the core of CBS News, first on radio and then on television.

That tradition continued through the 1960s, when tens of millions of Americans turned to Walter Cronkite for an honest report of the day’s news. If the newscast included editorial comments, as it sometimes did, they were offered by Eric Sevareid. They were non-partisan and clearly differentiated from the hard-news report. Cronkite ended each broadcast by saying, “And that’s the way it is.” The public believed him.

It isn’t that way anymore. If a CBS announcer uttered those words, only the naive would believe him.

CBS has willfully, deliberately destroyed that great legacy, relegating what was once the Tiffany Network to the bargain basement. They did it in the righteous name of a superior “woke” ideology and their hopes of lifting favored presidential candidates to victory. Equally important, they used the news to destroy political opponents and ideological heretics.

CBS is not alone. NBC and ABC have done the same thing. So have the country’s leading newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post. In abandoning the most basic journalistic standards, they have won accolades from the left, Pulitzer Prizes from the committees they dominate and mistrust (and cancellations) from anyone who disagrees.

CBS deserves special attention here for two reasons. First, they have fallen the farthest because they began on the highest perch. Second, their faults have been the most recent, most prominent and least defensible.

It’s crucial to note that CBS News did not make one or two errors, which could be written off as honest mistakes, readily corrected. Nor did it make a few favoring each party. No. CBS has discarded any pretense of journalistic neutrality while pretending it has not. It has consistently tilted in the same political direction. That pattern means these were not innocent errors. They were ideologically-driven network policy.

The most recent example came in the interview with Kamala Harris this week. The journalist, Bill Whitaker, deserves praise. He asked Harris important questions, did so calmly and relentlessly and followed up when she gave non-answers. He did it courteously and professionally.

Since Whitaker did his job well, where’s the problem? It lies in the edited version CBS aired on 60 Minutes. The edits were hidden and deceptive, all designed to make Harris look better than her actual performance. The clearest example was the vice president’s confused word salad when she was asked about Israel.

Whitaker asked if the Israeli government was actually listening to the Biden-Harris administration and implied it was not. Here is Kamala Harris’s response, the one not shown on 60 Minutes:

Well, Bill… 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.

Just add vinaigrette.

Instead of airing that word salad and letting the public judge for itself, CBS secretly and deceptively inserted this concise answer to a different question.

We are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.

CBS did more than air that edited response on TV. The network posted it as text on their website. In the print version, they could have easily alerted the public to the edit. Instead, they chose to hide it. The “democracy dies in darkness” crowd has been silent.

That’s not the only edit CBS made — the interview has multiple “jump-cuts” — and there have been calls for CBS to release the unedited transcript of the interview so it can be compared with the broadcast version. So far, CBS has refused.

That refusal is not the network’s standard policy. It’s their special “protect Kamala” policy. It’s different from their treatment of former president Donald Trump, whose July 2020 interview was conducted by Catherine Herridge. After that interview, Herridge notes, CBS posted the full transcript. So, why not now? Oh, go ahead and guess.

Herridge is one of the country’s top investigative reporters, known for her persistence and her journalistic neutrality. She was neck-deep in investigating Hunter Biden and Biden family corruption earlier this year when CBS fired her.

CBS also had a chance at neutral, professional journalism when it moderated the vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and J.D. Vance. Characteristically, it blew that chance.

The moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, showed their bias in two ways, one obvious and one hidden. The obvious one came during a discussion of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, when Brennan jumped in to offer her “fact-check.”

“And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status,” she said. Brennan wanted to emphasize that “legal status,” and J.D. Vance responded immediately, “Margaret, the rules were that you were not going to fact-check and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.”

Before Vance could explain, the moderators talked over him, told him to stop and then cut off his microphone. It was the only time the CBS moderators intervened to fact-check a candidate or cut off a mic. They passed up multiple opportunities to correct Walz.

The clumsy, obvious interference was a direct violation of the rules CBS had agreed to.

What was less obvious was the moderators’ failure to raise the issue most voters have said is most important: inflation that has outpaced their income. CBS touched on those issues only when the moderators asked about housing prices.

Housing prices are a perfectly appropriate topic, but then so are high prices for gas, food, clothing and more. Of course, those are all political problems for Democrats, and CBS ignored them. That oversight can be marked down as an “in-kind” contribution to their favorite party.

The hits to CBS reputation just keep on coming. The next happened this week after CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil interviewed Ta-Nehisi Coates, a prominent black writer. Coates’s latest book is a virulent attack on Israel — and Dokoupil asked hard questions about it.

The problem, like Whitaker’s questions of Kamala Harris, came not during interview but afterwards. Pro-Palestine staffers complained and network executives denounced the interview as not meeting their high standards.

But Dokoupil’s questions were legitimate, indeed obvious. Coates’s book doesn’t mention Palestinian terrorism, successive intifadas or October 7. It doesn’t mention that Israel is surrounded by mortal enemies, that the enemies’ goal is to exterminate the Jewish state and the Jews who live there and that the Israel people had suffered “café bombings, bus bombings, little kids blown to bits,” as Dokoupil put it.

Dokoupil then asked Coates about those omissions, “Is it because you don’t think that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?” The author gave no real answer except to say others had discussed those issues. Dokoupil’s next question was “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state, that is a Jewish safe place — and not any of the other states out there?”

Those are hard questions, but they are perfectly legitimate. The interviewer’s one over-the-top moment was his comment that the book’s treatment of Israel “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” That’s harsh, but who could say it’s inaccurate?

Although the interview was heated, it didn’t turn into an angry, yell-fest. Not so the aftermath. CBS staffers melted down en masse. The network’s executives responded with a groveling mea culpa session that apologized for the interview and denounced it for failing to CBS’s “standards and practices.”

So rattled were the delicate flowers in the CBS newsroom that the network honchos looked to bring in a “mental health expert, DEI strategist and trauma trainer.”

The level of Dokoupil’s support at CBS was evident when his co-anchors, Gayle King and Nate Burleson, declined to attend the meeting or offer support.

Dokoupil did receive backing from CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford and, more significantly, from Shari Redstone, the chair of CBS parent company. Redstone said the interview did meet CBS standards. Dokoupil also received anonymous support from a staffer who was sufficiently disturbed by the network’s genuflection to leak a tape of the call.

It is unclear, for now, if CBS plans to send Dokoupil to the rice paddies to learn from the Glorious Peasants. Still, his future at the network does not look bright. He might want to talk with Catherine Herridge about CBS’s tolerance for different views.

The network’s bias is clearest in two areas: anti-Republican and anti-Israel. How egregious is the anti-Israel bias? Well, the Free Press just reported that CBS senior director of standards and practices, Mark Memmott, told news staff, “Do not refer to [Jerusalem] as being in Israel.” Where, pray tell, is it? Micronesia?

All told, the tattered remnants of the Tiffany Network’s reputation are a sad story of decline and fall. CBS once set a powerful example for all broadcast news. In a way, it still does. What’s changed is that the example has changed from positive to negative.

But others still follow. All the legacy platforms are tumbling down the same path, overflowing with righteous indignation, guilt, leftist ideology and contempt for anyone who disagrees. They are betraying the public that one relied on them for honest reporting. That, sadly, is the way it is.