CBS News was forced to delete and replace a social media post about former House Speaker Dennis Hastert after it glossed over his sexual abuse of high school students.
Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker in history, died of natural causes at his Illinois home Monday, and The Daily Beast reported that the MAGA-friendly news network responded to intense criticism of its obituary, noting that he had been “jailed for violating banking laws” but made no mention of his sexual abuse of children.
The network later deleted the post and reshared the obituary, acknowledging that the original had “missed the mark.”
“Hastert was jailed on charges related to his concealment of hush-money payments made to cover up sexual abuse,” the new post stated.
But the obituary still described Hastert in its first paragraph only as having been jailed for violating banking laws, and it didn’t mention his abuse of boys until the end of the second paragraph, according to The Daily Beast.
The episode was the latest in a string of embarrassments at CBS News since Bari Weiss, who had no prior television news experience, was installed as editor-in-chief by Donald Trump ally David Ellison after his company Paramount acquired the network.
Since then, the network’s ratings have plummeted, some of its biggest stars have left or been fired, and the future of “60 Minutes” has been thrown into doubt by Weiss’ attempts to revamp the flagship newsmagazine.
Hastert, who served as speaker from 1999 to 2007, was sentenced in 2016 to 15 months in prison for evading banking regulations to hide hush-money payments to one of his victims. He was never charged with child sex abuse because the statute of limitations had expired.
At his sentencing, U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin described Hastert as a “serial child molester,” and the disgraced former speaker said he was “deeply ashamed” of his behavior but never explicitly acknowledged the abuse. He served 13 months in federal prison and was released in 2017.
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