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Nate Jackson
Nate Jackson contributes posts at The Patriot Post site. His career in political analysis began in arguments about Reaganomics with his eighth grade American History teacher. His study of history and politics continued through school and work, and he finally landed at The Patriot Post in 2004. He’s been managing editor since 2007.
CBS News hasn’t had this bad a week during a presidential election since 2004, when Dan Rather and the 60 Minutes crew fabricated those Texas Air National Guard documents to smear George W Bush and help John Kerry win. It didn’t work as planned.
This week, the snowballing disaster was twofold. First was the 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris, during which Bill Whitaker asked Harris some tough questions, and she failed miserably. It showed why, as our Douglas Andrews noted, she was hidden from the media until recently.
CBS’s problem, though, wasn’t that Whitaker asked tough questions. It’s that when Harris flubbed the answer with her typical meaningless word salad, the 60 Minutes team edited her answer so the audience got a more favorable picture of the vice president of DEI.
Asked to opine on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Harris said, “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.”
Whatever that means.
Her comment aired in a teaser, but CBS aired the interview on Monday night with a different answer: “We are 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.”
Was that a later part of the same long-winded answer, or did Harris’s comment belong to another answer altogether?
Almost laughably, Harris’s campaign rejected any suggestion that the edits were her idea. “We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS,” the campaign said. But such lockstep goals are standard practice with leftists. Just because Barack Obama didn’t call Lois Lerner and tell her to target Tea Party groups doesn’t mean she wasn’t doing his bidding. Just because Joe Biden didn’t call Mark Zuckerberg and tell Facebook to censor Covid posts…
Oh, wait. He basically did do that.
Anyway, there are plenty of examples of left-wingers in media or the deep state or wherever else doing the bidding of Democrat power brokers, including the Harris campaign’s virtual collusion with NBC News this week to trash Florida Governor Ron DeSantis during a hurricane. It’s what leftists do – goose-step together.
“I think there should be an outside investigation,” said one former CBS News journalist. “Obviously, there’s a problem here. If they care about journalistic integrity, they would conduct an investigation or release the full transcript.” When Donald Trump’s campaign also demanded the full transcript, former CBS journalist Catherine Herridge backed it up. “There is precedent,” she said. “It’s about transparency and standing behind the integrity of the final edit.”
The second controversy happened on the same day – October 7, no less. CBS’s Tony Dokoupil, who is Jewish and has two children living in Israel, was interviewing Ta-Nehsi Coates, who is clearly anti-Israel and arguably anti-Semitic, about the latter’s latest book, The Message. Naturally, that led to some harsh exchanges in part because the book condemns Israeli “apartheid” and largely tells the story from the perspective of “Palestine,” which doesn’t exist.
Dokoupil said Coates’s book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?” he asked. “Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”
The blowback was swift – against Dokoupil. According to CBS News deputy chief Adrienne Roark, “There are times we have not met our editorial standards.” CBS News, she claimed, is built on a “foundation of neutrality,” meaning, “Our job is to serve our audience without bias or perceived bias.”
“There were tears” at the staff meeting because people were “very upset.” Dokoupil “regretted” the tension but didn’t back down from his line of questioning. Shari Redstone, outgoing head of Paramount Global, which owns CBS, backed Dokoupil, saying, “I think we made a mistake” in reprimanding him.
Another CBS mistake? Reportedly telling staff not to refer to Jerusalem, the capital city of Israel, as being in, you know, Israel. “Do not refer to it as being in Israel,” Mark Memmott, CBS News’s senior director of standards and practices, told employees in August, though the communication was leaked this week.
“Then we can stop referring to CBS employees as journalists,” wrote the Washington Examiner’s David Harsanyi. Indeed.
You see, it’s been a bad week over at CBS, but it really only reveals the underlying problem: The left media is the “enemy of the people.” Imagine what this nation would be like if the mainstream media were even remotely fair. Remember that what Patriot Post readers know is far different from what the millions of people who only view mainstream media outlets “know.”
If the press were fair, this country might either be 80 per cent Republican, or the Democrats would be far less radically left wing, or both. That’s speculation, of course, but suffice it to say that the left media has a determinative effect on American politics and elections. CBS just happened to provide some glaring examples this week for those willing to take off the blinders.
This article was originally published by The Patriot Post and republished by PA Pundits – International.
