60 Minutes CBS Shame?

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Article in Status by Oliver Darcy, 4/23/25

Headline:  “The Shaming of Shari”

Subhead:  “The public shaming of Shari Redstone has been swift and scathing—but inside CBS News, the fury is even more pronounced, as staffers blame her for undermining the crown jewel of American TV journalism.”

“On Wednesday morning, Shari Redstone found herself at the center of a media firestorm. The unyielding heiress who controls Paramount Global—and, by extension, CBS News – was the target of one of the most brutal headlines in recent memory. The Drudge Report, still an influential force in the world of media, ran a stark image of Redstone above a brutal banner headline: ‘WOMAN WHO DESTROYED CBSNEWS.’ Below it, the accusations piled on: ‘REDSTONE GREED ENDING LEGACY?’  ’60 MINUTES’ SACRIFICED FOR SALE.’ ‘FREE SPEECH BATTLE OVER TRUTH’ ”

“It wasn’t an anomaly. Over the past 24 hours, Redstone has been subjected to a remarkable public shaming. Jake Tapper delivered a stinging on-air report, asserting that in her ‘quest to sell the company,’ it’s clear she will ‘bow to presidential pressure.’. . .”

https://www.status.news/p/shari-redstone-60-minutes-cbs-news

CBS – Hegseth Making It Up

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Article in Mediate by Micheal Luciano, 4/23/25

Headline:  ” ‘Totally Fake Story’: Pete Hegseth Denies Having Pentagon ‘Makeup Studio’ “

“Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth denied a report by CBS News claiming he ordered a room near the Pentagon press briefing room to be equipped with a makeup studio to be used for TV hits.

“The modifications were reportedly set to cost around $40,000, but were scaled back. CBS News reported . . .”

” ‘Totally fake story. No ‘orders’ and no ‘makeup’ — but whatever,’ he tweeted. ‘ We should have installed tampon machines in every men’s bathroom at DoD instead — the leftist “news” media would have loved that.’ ”

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/totally-fake-story-pete-hegseth-denies-having-pentagon-makeup-studio/

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Article in Huffpost by David Moye, 4/23/25

Headline:  “Social Media Brutally Mocks Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Makeup Studio”

Subhead:  ” ‘Nothing screams warrior culture more than a makeup studio,’ Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu cracked.”

“Social media gave Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a dressing-down on Wednesday after it was revealed he’d ordered that a room next to the Pentagon press briefing room he turned into a makeup studio/

“Retrofitting the room cost several thousand dollars, according to CBS News which noted the expenditure came at a time when Donald Trump’s administration is engaging in massive funding cuts. . .”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/peth-hegseths-pentagon-makeup-studio-mocked_n_68095354e4b0337d48c3bbab

 

 

Alternative to Hate-Media

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Article in The New Republic by Virginaia Hefferman, 4/23/25

Headline:  “Liberal Media in Crisis? Not The MeidasTouch. It’s Bigger than Rogan.”

Subhead:  “For real. The podcast by Ben Meiselas and his brothers regularly outdraws Joe Rogan’s. Their secret weapon? Reason. Imagine!”

“For years, progressives have fantasized finding a Joe Rogan of their own: someone butch and sonically seductive to beguile America’s acne class with sports jabber and pronoun jokes before turning the screws and making them vote his way.

“But Blue Joe Rogan will never materialize. And that’s for the best. Blood-sport propaganda by a UFC hype man doesn’t work in defense of liberal democracy. Liberalism, after all, rejects demagoguery as coercive, infantilizing, and anathema to critical thinking. While Rogan reliably slams the id with porny language, simian posturing, and primal sounds—and of course the Goebbels combo of repetition and cartoonish lies—progressive gab needs something closer to reason.

“When Ben Meiselas, a mild-mannered lawyer who sees himself as Mr. Rogers, entered the podcast-and-video octagon with the MeidasTouch Network (pronounced Midas, like the king), he seemed plenty reasonable. But no one saw a Rogan-slayer in him. Meiselas didn’t get drunk. He didn’t drone on about kettlebells or yuk it up with Alex Jones. Instead, he sat alone in his living room and, in short intervals, registered measured anger at Trump’s malignancy.. . .”

https://newrepublic.com/article/194187/meidastouch-ben-meiselas-liberal-media-bigger-rogan

Media Can Upset Fragile People

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Article in The Washington Post by Eric Wemple, 3/23/25

Headline:  “The Justice Department’s new argument: Trump is a snowflake”

“Why did Trump boot the Associated Press from the White House press pool? That’s an easy one.”

“President Donald Trump defaulted to his usual spiel when he discussed the expulsion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool. The wire service’s Stylebook declined to adopt Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘Gulf of America.’  ‘It’s called the Gulf of America now; it’s not called the Gulf of Mexico any longer,’ said Trump in a Feb. 18 news conference, a week after the expulsion.

“Piling on, the president also said that the AP has been ‘very, very wrong on the election, on Trump and the treatment of Trump,’ an apparent reference to his defeat in the 2020 election. That, of course, was a lie.

“The truth behind the sidelining of the AP, however, emerged from a hearing last Thursday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In that charged forum, a Justice Department lawyer argued that Trump was a snowflake who needed safe spaces, free from entities like the fearsome AP. . . ”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/23/trump-ap-autonomy-access/

 

NYT – A Dubious Win?

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alson, 4/23/25

Headline: “Q&A: Bill Grueskin on the New York Times Beating Sarah Palin (Again)”

Subhead: ” ‘Two things can be true: you can publish something about a public figure that is clearly false, and you can avoid being held financially liable for having done so.’ ”

“. . .the gods of the media beat soon handed down another big story. Compared with the 60 Minutes and USAGM imbroglios, which are relatively recent, this one concerned a much longer-running drama and a central character—Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate—who can perhaps be seen as an ur-Trump. Back in 2017, after a gunman opened fire on a congressional baseball practice, Palin sued the Times for defamation over an editorial that wrongly suggested she had helped incite the shooting of a different member of Congress, Gabby Giffords, six years earlier. (Palin’s PAC had published a map with crosshairs drawn over Giffords’s district. . .”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/qa_grueskin_palin_new_york_times_sullivan.php

Yet More Media Attacks

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Article in AOL The Morning Dispatch by Charlotte Lawson and Cole Murphy. 4/22/25

Headline:  “Trump Steps Up His Media Attacks”

Subhead: “Trump V. Journalists”

“President Donald Trump isn’t getting along with the news media.

“That isn’t exactly breaking news. He directed no shortage of jabs at mainstream outlets throughout his first term, but—with notable exceptions—his ire toward the media was limited mostly to rhetoric. Trump 2.0 may be different. The president’s attacks on the media have shifted from talk to action, with news organizations facing substantive retaliation for getting sideways with the new administration. And, if the escalation continues, the Trump administration could find itself running afoul of Constitutional protections—if it hasn’t already.”

https://www.aol.com/trump-steps-media-attacks-103601409.html?guccounter=1

Only Unfairness Doctrine Now.

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Article in Poynter by Liam Scott, 4/22/25

Headline:  “The repeal of the fairness doctrine accelerated the polarization of US media”

Subhead:  “When broadcasters no longer had to present diverse viewpoints, conservative radio thrived”

“The walk from his Federal Communications Commission office to the commission meeting room felt particularly long for Dennis Patrick on Aug. 4, 1987.

“That was the day that Patrick, then FCC chairman, and his colleagues unanimously voted to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, a policy that had mandated broadcast networks to fairly present differing viewpoints on controversial issues.

“Patrick remembers how quiet it was as he walked to the meeting that day with one of his aides.

“Finally he said to me, just before I opened the door to enter the commission meeting room, ‘Mr. Chairman, are you sure you really want to do this? You are going to have hell to pay,’ Patrick recalled. ‘And I said to him, “We are going to do the right thing, and I’m sure that we will have hell to pay.’ ”

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2025/poynter-50-repeal-fairness-doctrine-rush-limbaugh-conservative-talk-radio/

Poor Climate for Journalists

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Peter Schwartzsteibm 4/22/25

Headline: “How Climate Change Foils Climate Reporting”

Subhead: “Floods are hard to cover when the road is washed out.”

“. . .Climate change is replete with brutal ironies. To those must be added the ways in which climate is increasingly sabotaging journalists’ attempts to cover it. Places are being rendered inaccessible by extreme weather events. Gear is failing or breaking or simply proving unfit for purpose in tougher conditions. In this sometimes literal morass of mud and mind-boggling temperatures, this all-important story is getting harder to tell. . .”

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/climate-change-reporting-challenges.php

No Journalistic Independence Now

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Article in The Guardian by Leonie Chao-Fong, 4/22/24

Headline:  “60 Minutes executive producer leaves program over journalistic independence”

Subhead:  Bill Owens says in staff memo ‘it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it’ “

“Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, says he is leaving the flagship news program because he lost his journalistic independence.

“In a staff memo obtained by the New York Times, Owens said that ‘over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to . run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience’ . . .”

“He said the show will continue to cover the new Trump administration, adding: ‘The show is too important to the country. It has to continue, just not with me as the executive producer.’ ”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/22/60-minutes-executive-producer-leaves-bill-owens

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Article in Mediaite by Michael Luciano, 4/22/25

Headline: “Tapper Rips CBS Owner for 60 Minutes Shakeup Amid Trump Pressure: ‘Hope the Money’s Worth It, Shari’ “

“CNN’s Jake Tapper pilloried the controlling owner of CBS’s parent company after the departure of the executive producer of 60 Minutes on Tuesday.

“President Donald Trump is suing CBS over an interview 60 Minutes conducted last year with then-vice president Kamala Harris after she secured the Democratic presidential nomination. CBS aired two different parts of a response Harris gave to a question. One part of the response was in a teaser for the show, and the other was aired on the show itself.

“ ‘The president alleges that editing the 60 Minutes interview and running two different answers to the same question helped Vice President Harris and amounted to electoral fraud,’ Tapper explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Lead. ‘In reality, this is just editorial discretion. Editors do it all the time with recorded interviews, including all the time with taped interviews by Fox [News]’. . .”

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/tapper-rips-cbs-owner-after-60-minutes-shakeup-amid-trump-pressure-hope-the-moneys-worth-it-shari/

 

Ministry of Truth Spokespersons

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Article in Media Matters by Jack Winstanley & Shelby Jamerson, 4/21/25

Hedline:  “Right-leaning online shows claiming to be nonpolitical pushed pro-Trump messaging during the administration’s first 30 days”

“Media Matters reviewed 12 supposedly nonpolitical online shows and found two-thirds of episodes praised Trump or his administration or pushed right-wing misinformation/narratives

“Popular online shows that self-identify as comedy, business, or another supposedly nonpolitical category but have a right-leaning ideological bent — including those of Joe Rogan and Patrick Bet-David — pushed pro-Trump messaging and right-wing misinformation/narratives during the first 30 days of the Trump administration. . .”

https://www.mediamatters.org/google/right-leaning-online-shows-claiming-be-nonpolitical-pushed-pro-trump-messaging-during