CBS News has once again caved to President Donald Trump’s administration by offering up the journalistic integrity of Face the Nation, one of the longest-running television news broadcasts.
Freshly-merged Paramount Skydance announced Friday that it would no longer air edited interviews on Face the Nation, after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attacked the program for editing out her smears about Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
“This extra measure means the television audience will see the full, unedited interview on CBS and we will continue our practice of posting full transcripts and the unedited video online,” the company said in a statement.
Earlier this week, Noem complained that the show had removed a phrase referring toAbrego Garcia as a “known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member” and claiming that he’d solicited nude photographs from minors.
But Noem’s claims weren’t fit to air. The government has repeatedly failed to provide any evidence that Abrego Garcia was a member of a foreign gang. And a Tennessee magistrate judge previously ruled in June that the governments’ other claims were an “impossibility,” and that their evidence included “double hearsay.”
Paramount Skydance’s new policy transforms the Face the Nation newsroom into nothing more than a microphone for the Trump administration, stripping its own journalists of their editorial independence to report the facts.
The decision will likely allow guests’ grandstanding to go unchallenged, and reduce host Margaret Brennan’s ability to push back against her interviewees, or add essential context to their talking points. An official such as Noem has a tendency to present allegations as fact, and the Trump administration doesn’t seem to care about the difference.
This is just the latest in a long series of moves that demonstrate the rightward-shift of Paramount Skydance, and by extension, CBS News. Earlier this week, it was reported that Paramount Skydance had nearly closed a deal to bring in a new news head: Bari Weiss, a bastion of the anti-woke movement.
And last month, the company cancelled the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose titular host had called out the company for agreeing to pay a “big fat bribe” of $16 million to the Trump administration to settle a lawsuit over an edited 60 Minutes interview of failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Many speculated that by winning the favor of the Trump administration, the long-awaited merger between Paramount and Skydance had been allowed to proceed.
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