New CBS News chief Bari Weiss, whose center-left ideology is too far to the right for many of her employees, has done it again by naming a "mediocre straight white man" to anchor the division's flagship CBS Evening News.
A report late Tuesday in the UK Independent claims that "many staffers at CBS News are not thrilled" with Weiss picking CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil to sit in the anchor chair. “It’s an insult to the storied news giants who came before him,” one CBS News reporter told the paper.
If this were a stage play, this is where the script would indicate to the actor who said the thing about giants: Pause for laughter.
This is the same network that had to show Evening News anchor Dan Rather the door in 2005 for using laughable forgeries to "prove" that then-President George W. Bush repeatedly went AWOL during his service with the Texas Air National Guard as a fighter pilot.
Rather continues to stand by the story, including during his "return interview" last year on CBS Sunday Morning. He told his old network it was merely "an error made in good faith," even though bloggers in their pajamas were able to spot the forgeries within minutes of Rather airing them.
And Another Thing: Looking into that interview, I found this write-up from The Wrap repeatedly describing the 2004 story as "a botched investigation," without ever mentioning the forged documents or CBS's gullibility in relying on them.
I don't mean to pick on Dan Rather [Yes, you do, Steve —Editor], but that CBS Evening News anchor chair has seated some seriously unworthy butts since Rather's walk of shame out the door two decades ago.
Longtime Sunday show talking head Bob Schieffer was supposed to be Rather's temporary replacement, but the news division's bench was so thin that they kept him on longer than planned, until finally settling on chirpy morning show host Katie Couric.
The less said about Couric, the better. But I would like to take a moment to remind you that as a "journalist," she's so unbiased that she appeared as herself on an episode of Will & Grace, long after the once-funny show had descended into partisan mockery.
Couric was a ratings disaster, but still stuck around for about five years before being replaced by Scott Pelley, who at least stanched the ratings losses. Jeff Glor and then Norah O'Donnell followed Pelley. None of the three managed to improve CBS's reputation for bias.
John Dickerson & Maurice DuBois came on as dual anchors of a revamped broadcast in January, to no avail. Going back two decades, audiences seem to agree that CBS News is hardly anchored by "giants," as the Independent's source claimed. The nightly news show is the perennial third-place finisher behind rivals NBC and ABC.
Today, standards and practices at CBS News are so much higher that the company recently had to shell out $16 million for deceptive edits to a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris during her presidential race against Donald Trump. A CBS source told the New York Post in February that the edits did Harris “a lot of favors and makes her seem more succinct.”
“You have to watch the [unedited] video. A lot of ‘word salad,’” the source continued. “Feels like a cleanup on Aisle 7."
So you'll excuse me if I turn down the proffered hanky for the tears I'm not shedding for the angry CBS News staffers whining to the Independent that Dokoupil "only got the job because his views align with Weiss’ pro-Israel stance."
Whatever Weiss dishes out, CBS News deserves it.
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