Category: CBS

CBS News (Barely) Lets Catherine Herridge Report About the Biden Scandal

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Having witnessed a few newsroom shouting matches in my day, I can see Catherine Herridge hurling her coffee cup and yelling expletives at whatever editor was responsible for this headline on her article:

Comer says Wray confirmed existence of record
reporting alleged Biden bribery scheme,
which the White House strongly refutes

Oh, they refuted it, did they? Words have meanings, and the word “refute” is synonymous with disprove. The White House has done no such thing; what they have done is to deny any accusation of wrongdoing and to smear the congressional investigators attempting to get access to a document (an FD-1023 form) which has been subpoenaed, but which the FBI director has refused to turn over to them. Denials and smears are certainly not a refutation of anything, and I imagine Herridge would very much like to strangle whoever wrote that headline. And I also imagine she had some pretty heated back-and-forth with her bosses over the story itself. Herridge is one of two known conservative sympathizers (the other being Major Garrett) at CBS News, but providing some semblance of balance in the network’s reporting must require a constant battle to report stories that the Biden administration wants to bury. Anyway . . .

Here is the story, with a few of my comments:

GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, said in a statement Wednesday that FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed “the existence of an unclassified record that contains reporting of an alleged bribery scheme related to then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national.”
Comer believes the FBI record contains “a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose,” he and Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Chuck Grassley said in a letter to Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland in early May. The GOP lawmakers also said at the time, they believed the form “describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.”
While Comer and Grassley said in Wednesday’s statement that the record includes “very serious and detailed allegations implicating the current President of the United States,” they did not provide further evidence to support the claim.
Ian Sams, the White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, said: “This silly charade by Chairman Comer is yet another reminder that his so-called ‘investigations’ are political stunts not meant to get information but to spread thin innuendo and falsehoods to attack the President. He has already admitted this isn’t about uncovering facts but about trying to hurt the President’s poll numbers, so the only question left is how long he will waste time, energy, and taxpayer dollars to support a fact-free politically-motivated goose chase simply to get media attention and the Fox News spotlight.”

(Do you see anything — anything at all — in that White House statement that could be considered a “refutation”? No. What you see is a lot of mockery and deflection, but nothing directly addressing the real substance of the investigation.)

According to Comer, Wray offered in a phone call Wednesday to allow lawmakers to view it at FBI headquarters. Comer issued the subpoena earlier this month after a whistleblower had provided GOP lawmakers with information about an alleged bribery scheme involving Mr. Biden.
Grassley and Comer spoke with Wray by phone Wednesday after the FBI director did not provide the document by the May 30 deadline. The two Republicans are seeking evidence of any FBI probe into the allegation, and whether it was substantiated or deemed not credible.
Comer has said he would hold Wray in contempt of Congress if he did not turn over the document, and he reiterated Wednesday that he remains committed to initiating contempt proceedings.
“Today, FBI Director Wray confirmed the existence of the FD-1023 form alleging then-Vice President Biden engaged in a criminal bribery scheme with a foreign national,” Comer said in his statement.
In a statement to CBS News, the FBI described the FD-1023 form as a document “used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting by a confidential human source.” The bureau noted that “[d]ocumenting the information does not validate it, establish its credibility, or weigh it against other information verified by the FBI.”

(When did liberals become such fans of the FBI? As someone old enough to remember when the Church Committee era, I’m shocked by this development.)

Comer said that in their conversation, “Director Wray did not commit to producing the documents subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee.”
“While Director Wray — after a month of refusing to even acknowledge that the form existed — has offered to allow us to see the documents in person at FBI headquarters, we have been clear that anything short of producing these documents to the House Oversight Committee is not in compliance with the subpoena,” Comer said, adding that if the FBI failed to submit the document to the committee, he would begin contempt of Congress proceedings.

(Imagine the headlines if the FBI had treated a Democrat-controlled investigation this way: “FBI Director Defies Subpoena; Congress Threatens Contempt Charge.” But the media only seeks to manufacture public outrage when it involves demonizing Republicans or trying to provoke race riots.) 

In a statement, Grassley said, “While the FBI has apparently leaked classified information to the news media in recent weeks, jeopardizing its own human sources, it continues to treat Congress like second class citizens by refusing to provide a specific unclassified record. Director Wray confirmed what my whistleblowers have told me pursuant to legally protected disclosures: the FBI-generated document is real, but the bureau has yet to provide it to Congress in defiance of a legitimate congressional subpoena. This failure comes with consequences.”
In describing the FD 1023, Christopher Dunham, acting assistant director for the Bureau’s Office of Congressional Affairs, wrote in a May 10 letter that the FBI avoids “revealing information — including unverified or incomplete information — that could harm investigations, prejudice prosecutions or judicial proceedings, unfairly violate privacy or reputational interests, or create misimpressions in the public. Often, even confirming the fact of the existence (or nonexistence) of an investigation or a particular piece of investigative information can risk these serious harms.”
The FBI confirmed the phone call, but didn’t discuss the alleged document.
“During today’s call, Director Wray offered to provide the committee’s chairman and ranking member an opportunity to review information responsive to the subpoena in a secure manner to accommodate the committee, while protecting the confidentiality and safety of sources and important investigative sensitivities,” the FBI said in a statement. “The FBI has continually demonstrated its commitment to working with the committee to accommodate its request, from scheduling briefings and calls to now allowing the chair to review information in person. The FBI remains committed to cooperating with the committee in good faith.”
When Comer and Grassley first announced the subpoena to obtain the document, Ian Sams, the White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, said: “For going on five years now, Republicans in Congress have been lobbing unfounded, unproven, politically-motivated attacks against the president and his family without offering evidence for their claims or evidence of decisions influenced by anything other than U.S. interests.”

(Again, the White House “refutes” nothing.)

Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee released a report alleging that Biden family members and associates received over $10 million from foreign entities, but the White House noted that Republican investigators could not point to “a single Joe Biden policy” that was unduly influenced.

Thanks to Catherine Herridge for whatever angry shouting matches were necessary to get CBS News to actually let her report this story, which the rest of the mainstream media are trying to ignore altogether.

Permit me to suggest that what’s going on here — I mean, with the Biden scandal, not the shouting matches at CBS News — is that there is now a cover-up of the cover-up. That is to say, Christopher Wray and other corrupt officials atop the FBI hierarchy deliberately sabotaged the investigation of the Biden family’s foreign influence-peddling (a scandal that includes such crimes as tax evasion, wire fraud and money laundering), and that what they’re trying to do now is to sabotage the congressional investigation of their previous sabotage.

If Catherine Herridge’s bosses at CBS News had any integrity, they’d dig in on this story and lead the nightly news with it five days a week.



 

 

Brain-Damaged John Fetterman Gets ‘Democrat Helper’ Served by CBS News

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The best way to understand how liberal media bias operates is to think of it as a heavy wind, blowing into the faces of Republicans — at least a 10-point disadvantage from this hostile headwind — while providing Democrats with an equally powerful tailwind. Everything Republicans do is made to seem wrong and scandalous, while everything Democrats do is noble and courageous. There are occasions when this is so obvious that it’s like the media are serving up Democrat Helper™ — a steaming dish of one-sided bias. Just add a Democrat politician and stir.

Matt Margolis calls attention to how CBS Sunday Morning anchor Jane Pauley did this in her recent interview with John Fetterman, the Democrat who was “elected” U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania despite suffering traumatic brain damage from a stroke shortly before the Democratic primary last May. Shortly after he was inaugurated in January, it became apparent that Fetterman was incapable of fulfilling the duties of his office, and in February his staff came up with the genius idea of concealing the senator’s cognitive incapacity by having him admitted to Walter Reed for treatment of depression. Does anyone seriously believe that Fetterman’s biggest problem is a mood disorder?

Let us stipulate that a stroke as severe as the one Fetterman suffered could damage every aspect of his neurological function, including mood regulation. But the real problem — the reason Fetterman should resign, to allow Pennsylvania to have functional representation in the Senate — is that his cognitive abilities (which perhaps were never stellar) have been so impaired as to leave him unable even to speak coherently or process information. And what CBS did to conceal this was to carefully edit Paulie’s interview with Fetterman, using an obvious trick: Two cameras were used in the interview, one with a tight close-up of Fetterman, and the second with a wider shot, and whenever Fetterman speaks, they cut between the two shots, as if this is being done to add visual interest to the interview, rather than to edit out moments of babbling incoherence.

 

There is never any segment during the interview where Fetterman is shown speaking in a single shot for more than five or 10 seconds consecutively. And if you watch carefully, these interview excerpts constitute a fairly small share of the 10-minute piece, much of which is filled with Paulie narrating a tale of Fetterman’s “struggle,” intended to frame this as the saga of a hero courageously overcoming misfortune.

As much as anyone might lament Fetterman’s misfortune, however, it is certainly not evident that he has overcome the brain damage he suffered from his stroke last year, and Jane Paulie’s interview cannot be regarded as an honest depiction of Fetterman’s current condition. The CBS segment is propaganda, the whole point of which is to help Democrats maintain the fiction that Fetterman is capable of functioning as a U.S. Senator, so that they can avoid the risk and expense of a special election to fill the seat, if Fetterman were compelled to resign.



 

 

CBS News: White Males Are Heroes

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What? The liberal media gives good publicity to Trump voters?

A company that produces raw supplies for medical manufacturers has risen to the unprecedented challenges of the coronavirus pandemic. Not only did Braskem USA ramp up production of their much-needed materials, but the company also designated “live-in” teams who stayed and worked at their facilities for nearly a month.
The Braskem employees who volunteered to live at work did so to protect others and hopefully prevent the spread of the virus to their families. After 28 days on the job, these employees finally clocked out — and the joyous moment was caught on video. . . .
The team of about 40 workers worked in 12-hour shifts. During work hours, they make polypropylene, the raw materials used to produce a non-woven fiber found in N95 masks, hospital gowns, and sanitary wipes. Occasionally during their off hours, they could watch TV or get drive-by visits from family, WPVI reports.
Knowing they were making a difference in the battle against COVID-19 made the long stay at work worth it. “All the first responders, all the people on the frontlines, we thank you. That’s what makes our job easy to do,” Boyce said.

Now watch the video:

A bunch of heterosexual white males getting good publicity? I’m sure CBS network executives will fire the producer responsible for this.




 

Category: CBS

Big Trouble at the ‘Tiffany’ Network: Another ‘Get Woke, Go Broke’ Lesson?

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The top of the stack this morning at Drudge:

TIMES UP FOR '60 MINS' CHIEF...
CBSNEWS On-Cam Ambush Of Own Exec!
Network Airs Disturbing Fager Text...
Allegations of inappropriate conduct...
Threats and Deception: Why Board Turned On Moonves... 

The takedown of CBS boss Les Moonves was followed immediately by the takedown of 60 Minutes producer Jeff Fager, the latest casualties in the #MeToo crusade against men in the media. Let’s not kid ourselves about what’s happening here. When this began back in October 2017, it was possible to imagine that Harvey Weinstein was an isolated problem, an unusually bad person engaged in unusually bad behavior. As the list of targets lengthened beyond a few bad apples in Hollywood to include the news media, however, #MeToo brought to light a toxic culture in the world of big-time journalism, in which a sort of sexual pay-for-play ethos had long prevailed. If former Today show anchor Matt Lauer — a handsome and popular personality — could turn his NBC office into an upscale rape dungeon, was it possible to enforce standards of decency elsewhere in these organizations? That is to say, if the network’s multimillionaire on-air talent is engaged in predatory behavior, doesn’t that send a signal to all the lower-echelon personnel?

Something has gone terribly wrong in the TV industry, for the #MeToo scandal to have reached as high as the CEO of an organization once known as the “Tiffany Network.” It is perhaps impossible for young people to imagine the enormous prestige enjoyed by CBS during the life of its founder William S. Paley. CBS was the network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, of Lucille Ball and Ed Sullivan, of Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and The Waltons. Starting with a few Philadelphia radio stations in the 1920s, Paley more or less invented the concept of a nationwide broadcasting network, and insisted on the highest-quality programming. One measure of his success was that, during World War II, President Roosevelt tapped Paley “as director of radio operations of the Psychological Warfare branch in the Office of War Information at Allied Force Headquarters in London” with the rank of an Army colonel. Did I mention that CBS also owned a record company, the one that invented the 33 RPM album? Do you know who sang for Columbia Records? To quote 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, “Paley was the guy who put Frank Sinatra and Edward R. Murrow on the radio and 60 Minutes on television.” Yep — CBS owned Sinatra back in the day, and stars don’t come any bigger than Sinatra, except maybe The Beatles, who made their U.S. television debut on . . .? Yep, CBS, Ed Sullivan.

Something else about CBS: It was a great network for women, both in terms of audience and performers. My mother was a big fan of the detective programs that CBS did so well, with handsome leading men like Mike Connors on Mannix, and there was perhaps never a cowboy the ladies loved more than James Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke (with the possible exception of Michael Landon as Little Joe on NBC’s Bonanza). Paley seemed to have an innate understanding that attracting female viewers was crucial to success in the entertainment business. After all, who attracted women better than Sinatra? And beginning with Lucille Ball’s smash hit with I Love Lucy, CBS was always had the best female-led programming, as the TV home of Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett. What went wrong at CBS?

Part of the answer may be found in a Hollywood Reporter column by Linda Bloodworth Thomason, one of CBS’s most successful producers in the 1990s, when Designing Women was a huge hit. Thomason describes how, after Les Moonves became president of CBS Entertainment in 1995, his personal hostility toward her essentially destroyed her career:

I was immediately concerned when I heard that Mr. Moonves was rumored to be a big fan of topless bars. Then, someone delivered the news that he especially hated Designing Women and their loud-mouthed speeches. . . . I was at the pinnacle of my career. I would not work again for seven years. . . .
Then, I began to hear from female CBS employees about his mercurial, misogynist behavior, with actresses being ushered in and out of his office. His mantra, I was told, was, “Why would I wanna cast ’em if I don’t wanna f–k ’em?” And he was an angry bully who enjoyed telling people, “I will tear off the top of your head and piss on your brain!”

That’s no way to treat a lady, sir.

Of course, I am not a fan of Thomason’s feminist politics, but you can’t succeed in show business by killing off successful shows, and if Moonves put his personal prejudice ahead of his business interests, he was cheating the shareholders out of profit. In short, he lacked integrity.

What went wrong at CBS? Is it possible that the “Tiffany network” fell victim to a “Get Woke, Go Broke” problem? Politically, CBS was always generally liberal (see Bernard Goldberg’s 2001 blockbuster Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News), and both Moonves and his boss, Viacom CEO Summer Redstone, were Democrats. In much the way Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez shoved aside Joe Crowley in the Democrat primaries, powerful liberal men in media are now being destroyed by their feminist allies, who are no longer content to be quiet about the abusive behavior they were forced to endure as part of the bargain in the “progressive” coalition of Democrat Party interests.

What happens next? If men can no longer get rich (or get laid) by parroting whatever the latest liberal mantra may be, isn’t it possible that some men in the media will have a “Red Pill” awakening? Couldn’t the spectacle of careers being destroyed by the #MeToo movement yield a new awareness of the ugly reality hidden behind the hypocritical veneer of “progressive” solidarity? Think back to the Access Hollywood audio, where Trump bluntly described the situation of a network TV star: “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p–y. You can do anything.” Wasn’t this the honest truth about the way some women react to men who are major stars, as Trump was when The Apprentice was a Top 20 hit in 2005? “You can do anything” if you’re a star.

Wasn’t the same thing true of Les Moonves, who as CEO had the power to make or break the careers of women at CBS? Moonves was a liberal Democrat, and if he ever had anything negative to say about the womanizing behavior of Donald Trump (whose show ran on rival NBC), Moonves never said it until Trump ran for president as a Republican.

Women are attracted to men with money and power. This isn’t exactly a revelation to anyone who knows anything about women. What is happening with the #MeToo movement is that women have weaponized sex as a means of taking away men’s money and power — not in the old-fashioned transactional quid pro quo manner, but as a one-sided extortion racket. It’s like Stalin robbing banks to fund the Bolsheviks.

 

Guys like Les Moonves need to take the Red Pill and wake up to the reality of what feminism means in terms of changing social incentives. The fallout from #MeToo will not be limited to the destruction of a handful of personalities in show biz, journalism and politics. Wise men (and women) ought to consider what the consequences might be.



 

CBS: ‘Hey, Benghazi Is a Real Scandal’

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Here’s the headline at Legal Insurrection:

60 Minutes confirms Benghazi is a
real scandal, and you’ve been lied to

No surprise to anyone who has actually paid attention, of course, but the Obama administration and its media sycophants have spent months issuing excuses and manufacturing distractions — “Squirrel!” — in an effort to delay disclosure of the whole cover-up.

What has happened is essentially a repeat of what happened with the Lewinsky scandal: First, the flat-out lie, then months of carefully shifting the narrative so that when the truth becomes known, the political impact of the revelation is negligible, because people have relegated the incident to the category of Something That Already Happened. If the full truth had been known at the outset, the political result would have been different, but Democrats can survive scandals that would destroy any Republican in similar circumstances, simply because the mainstream media are sympathetic to Democrats and are therefore eager to assist them in perpetrating falsehood.

 


Experience Matters: Old Man Schieffer Puts Young Punk Pfeiffer in His Place

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“It looks like they’ve lost Bob Schieffer,” says John Hoge, which might be a slight exaggeration. Schieffer is a liberal, but he’s also a veteran Washington journalist who has seen enough scandals to know what a scandal looks like, and he was having none of the Jedi mind trick — “These are not the scandals you were looking for. Move along.” — from Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer today. Right off the bat, Pfeiffer tried to cast the argument in partisan terms, which every scandal-plagued politician does, claiming that any suggestion of wrongdoing is a manufactured artifice, the creation of one’s political opponents:

“[T]he Republican playbook here . . . they don’t have a positive agenda, try to drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped up hearings and false allegations.”

Schieffer was highly dubious of this excuse, and reminded Pfeiffer of how familiar his excuse-making sounded:

I don’t want to compare this in anyway to Watergate. I do not think this is Watergate by any stretch. But you weren’t born then, I would guess, but I have to tell you that is exactly the approach that the Nixon administration took. They said these are all second-rate things. We don’t have time for this. We have to devote our time to the people’s business. You are taking exactly the same line that they did.

Exactly right. Bob Schieffer was born in 1937, he was working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram the day JFK was shot, and he’s not likely to be impressed by a 37-year-old “senior advisor.” And when it came to Benghazi, Schieffer didn’t let Pfeiffer bulldoze him:

The bottom line is what [Susan Rice] told the American people [Sept. 16] bore no resemblance to what had happened on the ground in an incident where four Americans were killed. . . .
[T]hat was just PR, that was just a PR plan to send out somebody who didn’t know anything about what had happened. Why did you do that? Why didn’t the Secretary of State come and tell us what they knew and if you knew nothing say we don’t know yet? Why didn’t White House Chief of Staff come out? I mean I would, and I mean this is no disrespect to you, why are you here today? Why isn’t the White House Chief of Staff here to tell us what happened?

Pfieffer didn’t have a good answer for that. In fact, Pfeiffer had no answers for any real questions at all Sunday. Pfieffer tried to use the “doctored e-mails” distraction that Jazz Shaw discusses at some length, and which doesn’t have any bearing on the real issues about the Benghazi attack, which can be summarized simply: If the administration had nothing to hide, why were they lying?

One can agree with Schieffer that this isn’t Watergate “by any stretch” and still be curious about why, if everything was on the up and up, the administration was acting so shady. And why did Pfeiffer refuse to say where Obama was during the Benghazi attack?

Schieffer gave a little lecture later on Face the Nation about the IRS scandal that’s worth quoting in its entirety:

You heard Dan Pfeiffer earlier in the broadcast say that he wasn’t born when Watergate happened. Well, it will come as no news to anyone that I was. And when the burglars broke into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate, a lot of us back then found it hard to believe. Why would anyone break in to a political headquarters? What did they hope to find–bumper stickers? Yard signs? Nobody is dumb enough to pull a stunt like that. But they were. I admit I had about the same reaction when I first heard the IRS had gone after the Tea Party last year, the Tea Party? Surely no one could be dumb enough to think you could get away with something like that in an election year. But they were. So welcome to dumb and dumber. It did take a while for the news to get to some quarters. We heard that the President say that he didn’t find out about it until last week, last week, which qualified him for Washington’s fastest growing club, the longer and longer list of officials who suddenly don’t know much about a lot of unpleasant things from Benghazi to the Associated Press investigation. At this point, just spare me the talking points and the excuses. No matter whether Republicans or Democrats are doing this kind of thing, this stuff is not just wrong it’s really stupid. And it will take more than firing a few temps and low-level bureaucrats to fix it. The President won reelection with a smart political team, but the election is over. Maybe he should look now for people of substance who know about other things who could help him govern.

As they say in Texas: Hell to the yes, Bob.

 

‘Arab Spring’ Update: Foreign News the Media Doesn’t Want to Ask Obama About

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Kirsten Powers points out what was so obviously missing from Sunday’s 60 Minutes softball interview:

Now, I’m sorry, is anyone paying attention to what’s going on in North Africa? Why is the president not asked about Algeria, Mali, Libya? These are front and center in the news right now.

Indeed. Lots of news out there:

Algeria has bolstered its military presence along the southern border.
Security sources said the Algerian Army was ordered to send thousands of troops along the southern border with Mali. . . .
The sources said [Al Qaeda in the Maghreb] units were believed to have fled Mali amid French air strikes. They said the Algerian Army was ordered to open fire on suspected insurgents and attack strongholds.

Yeah, what’s going on in Mali?

A rebellion in Mali that might have otherwise excited little interest commanded international attention when word came of its hardline Islamist nature and, more importantly, its ties to Al Qaida in the Maghreb (AQIM). . . .
The alliance between AQIM and the Tuareg people of Northern Mali and adjacent lands is a curious one. The Tuareg have a long history of opposing encroaching peoples . . .
The Tuareg see AQIM as an ally in their cause, but the latter is more of a burden because it brings regional and international opposition to the Tuareg movement for autonomy. Instead of bringing needed help to the Tuareg, AQIM is bringing a formidable invasion. Realization of the overwhelming opposition before them may be behind the recent split in the Tuareg forces . . .

So there’s a Tuareg rebellion that al-Qaeda has exploited in northern Mali — has anybody asked Obama about this? I think not. What about security problems at our embassies and consulates?

Foreign security contractors for U.S. diplomatic facilities have been deemed inadequate, a report said.
The State Department said the majority of foreign security contractors hired to protect U.S. embassies and consulates were deemed insufficient and inadequate. The department’s inspector-general surveyed foreign guards deployed around 86 diplomatic posts.
“OIG [Office of the Inspector-General] also found at some overseas posts that local guard contracts let under the current lowest-price award method had performance problems and an increased need for oversight from department officials — a condition that may be alleviated by the use of the best-value method where price is not the overriding factor in awarding the contract,” the inspector-general said in a report.
The report, released in February 2012, said foreign security guards deployed at two-thirds of the 86 posts were deemed inadequate. The inspector-general said the biggest problems included the U.S. embassy in Iraq.

Hmmm. A report in February 2012 — seven months before the attack on the consulate in Benghazi — warned of “performance problems” with hired guards at facilities. Kinda curious that they couldn’t ask Obama about that during his 60 Minutes interview. More headlines:

Timbuktu liberated but priceless manuscripts destroyed
— ABC News

Iran denies reports of explosion at Fordo nuclear site
— BBC

U.S. Weighs Base for Spy Drones in North Africa
— New York Times

Lots of news out there, but the hard-hitting investigative journalists at CBS News couldn’t be bothered to ask Obama about any of it.

 

Ask Michele Bachmann About CBS News Political Director John Dickerson

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There was a great uproar over John Dickerson’s column advising Barack Obama to “go for the throat” and “declare war” on Republicans, but it wasn’t as if there were no prior evidence of Dickerson’s biases. Remember the November 2011 debate in Spartanburg, S.C.?

In an e-mail exchange, a network staffer informed CBS political analyst John Dickerson that Bachmann was interested in appearing on Dickerson’s post-debate webcast. The staffer CC’ed the message to Bachmann’s communications director Alice Stewart and when Dickerson answered, he evidently clicked “reply to all” without realizing that what he wrote would go directly to the Republican aide. Dickerson wrote:“Okay let’s keep it loose though since she’s not going to get many questions and she’s nearly off the charts in the hopes that we can get someone else.”
What Dickerson appeared to be mean by his “keep it loose”remark was that he wanted to avoid a firm commitment to have Bachmann on the webcast, as he was hoping to “get someone else” as a guest. But the part of the 29-word Dickerson e-mail that infuriated Bachmann’s team most was what looked very much like proof of a preordained decision by CBS that the candidate would not“get many questions” during the debate because she was “off the charts” — out of contention for the GOP nomination, based on her declining poll numbers. Posting the e-mail to Bachmann’s Facebook page, campaign director Keith Nahigan fumed that Dickerson’s comments were “concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows — the liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message and limiting Michele’s questions.”

This is who John Dickerson is, and this is what John Dickerson does. And there isn’t anyone with any influence at CBS News who doesn’t share Dickerson’s biases. CBS News is a partisan political organization completely devoted to the success of the Democratic Party.

Strange as if may seem, however, CBS — traditionally the most liberal of the Big Three networks — is now rather moderate compared to the strident leftism that prevails at NBC News under the influence of NBC’s fanatically partisan political director Chuck Todd.

The Federal Election Commission should count the “news” budgets of the major networks as contributions to the Democratic Party.