|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
CBS, the once highly respected “Tiffany Network,” began its noticeable turn to the left in its news department when Dan Rather became the news anchor for the CBS Evening News in 1981. CBS News has been trending left ever since, with a few exceptions.
One of those exceptions was hiring Catherine Herridge in 2019, a renowned investigative journalist who had previously reported for Fox News. She is the rare journalist these days who objectively digs deeply into the facts underlying her stories before she reports what she has learned to her viewers and does so without fear or favor. Ms. Herridge is also courageously standing up for her First Amendment rights as she faces potential contempt of court charges by refusing to disclose her confidential sources for a story that she had worked on while at Fox News.
However, Catherine Herridge’s days became numbered at CBS following the appointment last August of Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, a woke executive, to serve as the president of CBS News. Ms. Ciprian-Matthews is CBS News’s highest-ranking woman of color who is fully committed to the woke ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has served for example, on the Global Inclusion Advisory Committee led by the President and Chief Executive Officer of Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company.
Ms. Ciprian-Matthews has been accused in the past of sidelining current white employees and prospective employees in an effort to advance the prospects of persons of color. In one instance reported by the New York Post, “a white job candidate claimed Ciprian-Matthews told her it would be easier to hire her if she were a ‘different color’ as she passed her over.”
In keeping with this leftwing, identity group mindset, Ms. Ciprian-Matthews clashed with CBS News’s senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge over her reporting. Ms. Herridge is an aggressive white journalist and anything but woke in her reporting – qualities that must have ruffled Ms. Ciprian-Matthews’ feathers.
Paramount Global’s mass layoff of eight hundred employees overall provided the perfect pretext for CBS News under Ms. Ciprian-Matthews’ leadership to summarily terminate Ms. Herridge’s employment on February 13th. She was one of just twenty CBS News employees who lost their jobs out of a pool of more than one thousand CBS News employees.
Adding insult to injury, CBS News reportedly held onto her files and her work laptop to examine them before being returned to Ms. Herridge, jeopardizing the confidentiality of her sources. Departing journalists normally take all their files with them immediately without interference. Now, days after CBS News let Ms. Herridge go, CBS News is reported to have finally returned the notes to Ms. Herridge that it improperly seized in the first place, giving CBS executives time beforehand to scour them.
While not publicly commenting herself on CBS News’s actions against her, Ms. Herridge shared on X a union statement that condemned “CBS News’ decision to seize Catherine Herridge’s reporter notes and research from her office, including confidential source information.”
“She got rid of her enemies under the guise of budget cuts,” according to one source, referring to Ms. Ciprian-Matthews, as quoted by the New York Post,
But Ms. Ciprian-Matthews’ own enmity towards Catherine Herridge is only part of the story. There was concern within the senior ranks of CBS about the recent subject matter of Ms. Herridge’s reporting that cast President Biden and his family in an unfavorable light.
Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Chair of public interest law at George Washington University Law School and a legal commentator, wrote a column for The Hill in which he noted that the “timing of Herridge’s termination immediately raised suspicions in Washington. She was pursuing stories that were unwelcomed by the Biden White House and many Democratic powerhouses, including the Hur report on Joe Biden’s diminished mental capacity, the Biden corruption scandal and the Hunter Biden laptop. She continued to pursue these stories despite reports of pushback from CBS executives, including CBS News President Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews.”
The House Judiciary Committee is initiating an investigation into the circumstances of Ms. Herridge’s termination and seizure of her files. It sent a letter February 23rd to CBS News President Ciprian-Matthews, the New York Post reported, demanding that “the network reveal who at CBS or parent-company Paramount Global ‘made the decision to terminate’ Herridge.” The letter also inquired into the reason for the seizure of Ms. Herridge’s confidential files and who at CBS and its parent company Paramount Global had access to them. “The unprecedented actions of CBS News threaten to chill good journalism and ultimately weaken our nation’s commitment to a free press,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio declared in the letter.
The committee has requested documents and communications relating to Catherine Herridge’s materials that had been held at least temporarily by CBS News after she was terminated. The scope of this request should extend beyond any internal communications and include all emails and texts between CBS and/or Paramount Global personnel and the Biden White House and/or Biden campaign personnel. To close the circle, the committee should also request – and subpoena, if necessary – the Biden White House and campaign directly for all such communications in their possession.
The targeting of Ms. Herridge for the chopping block may have been linked, according to the New York Post, to her “recent reporting that President Biden may have kept evidence that he had foreign business dealings while in office.” Given Ms. Herridge’s track record, CBS News’s senior investigative correspondent would have kept on digging until she got to the bottom of the story, which could have meant curtains for the “Big Guy.”
CBS’s and Paramount Global’s top executives did not want to take the chance that CBS News would be blamed by President Biden and his supporters for helping to bring the president down. They were no doubt aware that the Biden White House and presidential campaign were already infuriated with reporting by some media outlets that they considered to be overly critical of President Biden and his family.
Last September, for example, the White House sent a letter to top U.S. news executives demanding that the media “ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.”
Complaining about press coverage of the Hur report including by CBS News, Ian Sams, the White House counsel’s office spokesperson, wrote a February 13th letter to the White House Correspondents Association president alleging “significant errors” in the reporting. And TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser for the Biden campaign, issued a statement on February 12th criticizing the media for “gratuitous and sensationalist attacks on the President’s age.”
The Biden White House’s Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates chastised the media for forgetting that “the rightwing age attacks they treat as novel are… old.” Mr. Bates also has a history of hostility against Catherine Herridge specifically, calling her a “right-wing hack” when he was Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign director of rapid response. Bates claimed back then that Ms. Herridge was “a regular conduit for conservative media manipulation ploys…”
Ms. Herridge “offense” was a scoop documenting then-Vice President Biden’s inclusion on a list of Obama administration officials requesting the “unmasking” of former national security adviser Michael Flynn who was referred to generically in a NSA foreign intelligence document. Reporting the truth made Ms. Herridge a “right-wing hack” in Andrew Bates’s eyes.
It is not unreasonable to expect that Andrew Bates would carry his personal animosity towards Ms. Herridge forward to his deputy press secretary job at the Biden White House.
The suspicions surrounding the timing of Catherine Herridge’s termination and seizure of her files are well-founded. CBS News, like other media outlets, was under pressure from the Biden White House and presidential campaign to cut their negative coverage of President Biden’s mental decline and of his family’s business dealings that could implicate the president himself. Ms. Herridge was offered up by CBS News as the perfect sacrificial lamb whom its woke president, Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, had little use for anyway. A comprehensive congressional investigation into all this is imperative.
See B.S. News 60 Minutes Sunday Morning Etc. this is by far one of this Nations biggest sources of leftists Propaganda CBS The Lying Eye of Satan
Ciprian-Matthews is “a person of color?” I didn’t know “pasty” was a color. Somebody should tell her that whites are the most colorful people in the world, with absolutely no competition in that regard, which should be meaningless anyway.
“…….our nation’s commitment to a free press,” I see Jim Jordan has a healthy sense of humor.
I remember Catherine Herridge from her time at Fox News. She’s definitely an old fashioned investigative journalist, which is the first thing I noticed about her along with her professional demeanor. There are very few of those around. The only other one I remember from Fox is Greta Van Susteren. As good as many of the Fox News hosts are, I can’t think of any who are real investigative journalists. It’s odd that the only two I noticed are both women. I guess I’m too used to those old Clark Gable and Kirk Douglas movies.
Van Susteren is at Newsmax now, which is a real news network. It’s objective but honest about its conservatism. It’s impossible to be an objective leftist, of course, not that any of them would ever try. They do pretend to be objective and fail miserably with anybody who has an IQ eeven one point higher than a Paleosimian’s. Maybe Herridge will end up at Newsmax or Real America’s Voice like quite a few other former Fox employees have. Either network would be lucky to have her.
Perhaps CBS should change its name to Pravda.
Actually, no. “See B.S.” works quite nicely.
now please.. what did Pravda ever do to warrant such a slam?
CBS began its journey to some views when Cronkite falsely claimed that the Tet Offensive was an American military defeat
Cronkite is Dead Jim he has paid his price for his Treason
This story underlines why I hate every damn thing about the left.
Cronkite a lefty blowhard
If Ms Herridge needed any convincing that she was onto something, her sacking has to constitute proof. I think CBS just shot themselves in the foot.
Sure, CBS returned some of her notes but who among us believes they didn’t dig through them first to find her sources so they can dutifully hand the names over to the Chinese and Democrat communists? The proof will be when the whistleblower mysteriously disappears and the crooked judge not so mysteriously stops insisting that Herridge disclose her sources.
If you are willing to lie and misuse political power you can get away with anything if you are also a democrat. You can twice impeach a president on the flimsiest of grounds. You can even elect a Biden-Harris duo and then hand them all the latitude and protection needed to use extant powers and unlawfully expanded authority to increase their power and wield it to punish and silence anyone who is perceived as a threat. On the other hand, republicans, though often fearful and misguided, at least have a conscience and a few other moral impediments to succeeding in politics today.
The firing of Ms. Herridge should serve as further evidence that our MSM outlets, particularly in television journalism, have degenerated into nothing more than infomercials with agendas. She has become the perfect canary in the coal mine, sad to say.