CBS’ Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Election Year

In an election where Americans finally began to tune out legacy media, CBS drove the decline.

A new Gallup poll from October found Americans’ trust in mass media hit a new low with just less than a third maintaining a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of confidence in newspapers, television networks, and radio to report on events “fully, accurately and fairly.” The survey results were published about two weeks after CBS moderated the vice-presidential debate that gave Americans good reason to stop believing corporate media was the appropriate medium for facilitating U.S. elections.

If CBS executives believed they could rehabilitate the media’s image as a trusted avenue of fair and balanced information to guide voters in an election year, they have been proven wrong by their own network.

On Oct. 1, vice-presidential debate moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan validated the suspicions of those skeptical that CBS would offer Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio., an even forum to challenge Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. O’Donnell had already recently blamed Donald Trump and his running mate for “increasing the threat of political violence” even after a second assassination attempt on the then-GOP presidential nominee. In 2022, the outlet also participated in the media blackout of the “Twitter Files” and O’Donnell peddled the narrative that federal agents had not actually seized former President Donald Trump’s passports in the raid of Mar-a-Lago. In other words, the veteran television host with more than two decades of experience in legacy media carried the typical biases Americans can expect from such outlets.

On Oct. 1, neither O’Donnell nor Brennan seriously fact-checked Walz, but rushed to interfere with Vance’s answer on immigration.

“The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’ open border,” Vance said, amplifying the concerns of residents within his home state.

The CBS moderators reinforced Walz against the senator.

“Just to clarify for our viewers,” Brennan said, “Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.”

Brennan continued to deny Vance a chance to respond until the Republican candidate eventually spoke over the CBS moderators and forced the network to let him speak. “I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on,” Vance said. “So there’s an application called the CBP One App, where you can go as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole, and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open-border wand.” The mics were then muted as the two candidates started to speak over each other.

CBS’ election interference continued throughout October. In the week after the vice-presidential debate, CBS released an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris for the network’s traditional election-year special on “60 Minutes.” Trump refused to participate in a sit-down interview for the program this fall after a combative Lesley Stahl blatantly claimed four years ago that evidence implicating Joe Biden in his son’s laptop scandal and in the effort to spy on Trump’s campaign in 2016 simply didn’t exist.

The network moved forward with interviewing Harris, whose participation raised more questions about CBS’ integrity than it did answers about the vice president’s capabilities. CBS incidentally released two different answers from Harris to the same question related to Israel presented by Bill Whitaker during the interview before refusing to reveal the full transcript to explain the discrepancy. The apparent deceptive edit presented a cleaned-up answer from Harris in place of another one of the word salads that defined her campaign.

CBS never did release a full transcript to explain the discrepancies perceived as blatant election interference. The refusal to clear any confusion provoked a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to say the debacle likely warrants an investigation. In a recent podcast interview with Joe Rogan ahead of election day, Donald Trump, who sued the outlet over the matter, said CBS’ actions amounted to the “biggest scandal in broadcast history.”

“They’re diminishing themselves, they’re killing all their credibility,” Rogan said in approval.

Several months prior to the interview, a local CBS affiliate also opened the election by denying Harris ever fundraised to bail out Minnesota rioters for “Black Lives Matter” despite a post remaining live on X that shows otherwise.

While CBS worked to propel the Harris/Walz ticket through October, trouble within the network publicly erupted after morning anchor Tony Dokoupil interviewed author Ta-Nahisi Coates about an, as Fox News summarized it, an “anti-Israel” portion of his book, The Message. Dokoupil offered criticism that the author’s views came across as extreme and lacking in important details

“I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, publishing house goes away, the content of that section 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, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much? 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 the second Intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits. Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?

His criticism was met by an uproar among CBS staff apparently in tears to whom Dokoupil, a Jewish anchor, reportedly “expressed regret.” He was also reportedly “forced” to meet with the network’s Race and Culture Unit. Dokoupil’s actions were also admonished by CBS leadership, which claimed Dokoupil’s interview did not meet the outlet’s “editorial standards,” The Free Press reported.

The episode was an embarrassing scandal to coincide with the network’s activist coverage on behalf of Vice President Harris, underscoring the currents of extremism running through CBS and undermining the credibility of the legacy media.

Tristan Justice is a national correspondent for The Federalist and the co-author of “Fat and Unhappy: How ‘Body Positivity’ Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself).” He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at [email protected]. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here. Buy “Fat and Unhappy” here.