CBS News, which has in recent months faced renewed accusations of far left anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias, has emerged as a sticking point in the planned acquisition of CBS’ parent company, Paramount, by Skydance Media, the studio owned by David Ellison whose father, Larry, is the world’s fourth richest person, according to recent reports.
Under the merger terms currently being discussed with President-elect Trump’s incoming head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, the left-leaning news outlet may be forced to prove it can conduct itself as a “neutral” organization, people close to Trump’s transition team told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino.
That may include handing over the full, unedited transcript of CBS’s notorious taped “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Harris, which Trump has accused the network of heavily editing to make the Democratic nominee sound coherent. At the height of the 2024 campaign, CBS News released, on three different platforms, three sequences of Ms. Harris replying to the same question about Iran with three different answers.
Trump called the incident the “Greatest Fraud in Broadcast History” and has since filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS, accusing the network of engaging in “voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion.” The network acknowledged that they tweaked the video for accuracy and clarity, which is standard practice at TV networks, but denied that they intentionally boosted Ms. Harris via strategic edits.
Last month, Mr. Carr, whom Trump had announced as his pick for FCC chair, told Fox News that “I’m pretty confident that that news distortion complaint over the ‘60 Minutes’ transcript is something that is likely to arise in the context of the FCC review of that transaction.”
Even further, CBS may be barred from producing news coverage that aggressively favors the left, including “how its anchors comport themselves during presidential debates,” the Post reports. The prospect of CBS being held accountable for bias comes after CBS News hosts Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan were fiercely criticized for bias towards Governor Walz when CBS News hosted the sole vice presidential debate.
Specifically, Ms. Brennan, host of the low-rated “Face the Nation”, was widely denounced for attempting to fact-check Senator Vance , even though the network had promised not to do fact-checking. Such treatment was not applied to Governor Walz. Mr. Vance immediately challenged Ms. Brennan for violating the compact, and retorted by fact-checking her.
In an archaic rule related to CBS having government permission to broadcast “over the air” — that is, broadcast to televisions using old fashioned antennas as was common in the 1970s and years prior — the network is supposed to give “equal time” to both sides in political contests. During the campaign, NBC allowed Trump to run a long advertisement for free after it hosted Ms. Harris on “Saturday Night Live” and did not offer Trump the same opportunity. In the case of the “60 Minutes” interview with Ms. Harris, CBS extended the offer to Trump, who declined, citing concerns about bias in editing.
Some legal observers believe the “equal time” rule should also apply to news programming in general, not just candidate interviews and appearances. The three “over the air” channels that air national news programming – CBS, NBC and ABC – all lean far to the left and the only serious complaints to the FCC have involved obscenity, such as Janet Jackson’s notorious “wardrobe malfunction” during CBS’ Superbowl halftime broadcast, which led to a fine.
Conservatives complaining about CBS News’ liberal bias goes back to the 1980s when Senator Jesse Helms led an unsuccessful campaign to take over CBS and “be Dan Rather’s boss.” The mega-bestselling 2001 book, “Bias”, by Bernard Goldberg, which set off a national debate about media prejudice, focused on Mr. Goldberg’s alma mater, CBS News. Usually any efforts by the government to rein in liberal broadcasters has been met with eye rolling and groaning, reports the closely-read Hollywood newsletter, “What I’m Hearing”, but this time could be different.
Matt Belloni, the author of “What I’m Hearing”, wrote Monday night that Trump’s “outrage” over the “60 Minutes” interview “could lead to the D.O.J. extracting some CBS-related concessions in exchange for greenlighting the Skydance transaction.”
Larry Ellison, who’s put his vast wealth behind his son’s acquisition of CBS, is a staunch supporter of Israel, and CBS News has been roiled in recent months over controversies related to anti-Israel conduct by the news operation’s new executive leadership, whose backgrounds are entirely in local news.
The trouble began in late September, after one of its morning hosts, Tony Dokoupil, a convert to Judaism, interviewed the virulently anti-Israel author, Ta-Nehisi Coates about his bestselling new book, “The Message,” and pressed the bestselling author on his hostile rhetoric. The “CBS Mornings” anchor, during the September 30 interview, suggested that some of the language in Mr. Coates’s book, which is harshly critical of the Jewish state, is akin to that which could be found “in the backpack of an extremist.” Mr. Dokoupil also questioned why the author refrained from including important contextual details such as the fact that Israel is surrounded by “countries that want to eliminate it” as well as the first and second intifada.
Mr. Coates took it in stride and answered gamely. But soon after the interview aired, anti-Israel employees of the left-leaning network lodged internal complaints about Mr. Dokoupil’s line of questioning. A week later, on the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack, CBS senior executives, including chief executive Wendy McMahon and her deputy, Adrienne Roark, announced during an internal meeting that the interview did not meet CBS News’ editorial standards, the Free Press, which obtained a recording of the meeting, reported.
Although the executives quickly tried to change the subject, the network’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, objected to their assessment of the interview and came to Mr. Dokoupil’s defense.
“I thought our commitment was to truth,” she can be heard saying on the recording. “And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists, we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And, to me, that is what Tony did.”
The network’s handling of the situation, as well as the poor timing of the executive’s comments, prompted a barrage of criticism both internally and externally. Paramount Global’s outgoing chairman, Shari Redstone, in a rare move, said that she thought the executives made a “mistake” and praised Mr. Dokoupil.
Puck reported that “many at CBS News, and across the media industry more broadly,” viewed the whole incident as a “leadership failure on the part of McMahon, who had simultaneously exposed a star anchor and let an internal editorial debate metastasize into a full-blown controversy.” It was widely noted that Ms. McMahon and Ms. Roark have only worked in local news and are finding themselves outmaneuvered by CBS News’ long-embittered staff who have long been masters of leaking to the press and undermining their bosses. But in the case of Ms. McMahon, the president of the CBS Entertainment Group, George Cheeks, who is also co-chief of Paramount, came to Ms. McMahon’s defense, describing her as an “outstanding” and “accomplished” leader. Nevertheless, Mr. Belloni said on his podcast, “The Town”, that Ms. McMahon would be “gone by the end of the year.”
It wasn’t long before CBS News faced more accusations of anti-Israel and antisemitic conduct. On October 9, the Free Press reported that a standards executive at CBS News directed reporters not to refer to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, given that, “Palestinians claim East Jerusalem—occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war—as the capital of a future state.”
The next day, the Free Press published an email sent by CBS News executives to reporters the day after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, which showed that the higher ups had cautioned their journalists against referring to Hamas members as “terrorists.”
“Reporting on this weekend’s violence in Israel and Gaza requires a closer look at the language we use when describing events,” the email, which was entitled “Standards guidance: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” stated. “For instance, the U.S. government considers Hamas a terrorist organization; however, suggesting an individual is a ‘terrorist’ may be inaccurate depending on the facts.”