Will Vance Use Debate to Ask CBS to Apologize to Its Own Reporters for Ethics Scandals?

Just weeks after the ABC News moderators gave America the most biased performance in presidential debate history, Republican J.D. Vance in his upcoming CBS Vice Presidential debate is likely to be ready to counter any similar bias from that network’s moderators. A skilled polemicist and writer with highly developed critical faculties, Vance can be expected to bring up the very Harris-Walz ticket vulnerabilities the CBS moderators will undoubtedly try to steer away from such as the ugly realities of Harris-Biden hyperinflation, border destruction, rising crime, and foreign dangers. But how fun it will be if Vance also mentions other forbidden topics to network news operations such as Kamala Harris’s instability as a boss, with a 92% turnover on her vice-presidential staff, or the exploding charges of anti-Catholic bigotry against her and vulnerable down-ticket Democrats as a result of allegations by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich that Harris is the most anti-Catholic presidential candidate in the last 150 years, or the allegations laid out in a series of hard-hitting TV ads, hammering endangered Senate Democrats for their party’s persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor, attempts to stop Catholics from holding public office like judgeships, FBI Director Christopher Wray’s cover-up of the Biden-Harris persecution of traditional Catholics, and the White House’s thumb in the eye to Christians with its now notorious transgender proclamation on Easter Sunday.

But if in doing the CBS moderators’ jobs for them, Vance actually makes Democrat Waltz answer something other than softball questions, he could also downright thrill tens of millions of Americans by bringing up the great unspoken, and possibly most important, issue of the 2024 campaign. Like Vivek Ramaswamy during one of the GOP primary debates last year, he could ask the moderators to address the matter of a corporate media that is, in the eyes of much of the public, gravely corrupt. Vance, then, could ask his questioners why TV networks that claim to be journalistic enterprises have a liturgical adherence to running only negative stories about Republican candidates and favorable ones about Democrats—and thus appear to the public as the media arm of the left-wing ruling class and current administration— but he also might take a step beyond and focus on CBS’s own distinctive history here. Notably, the cases of reporters Catherine Herridge and Sharyl Attkisson, whose persecution by the network will someday be studied by journalism students as classic examples of the era of corporate media corruption and the network’s determination to serve power, not truth.

Before describing, however, Herridge’s and Attkisson’s attempt to defy their bosses’ determination to cover up what is, in Herridge’s case, probably the worst public corruption case in American history—the use of public office by a U.S. Vice President to enrich his family to the tune of $27 million (a felony under federal law)—and in Attkisson’s case, the worst falsehood told to the American people during a national security crisis since the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a revisit is in order to the delightful moment a year ago when Vivek Ramaswamy held the media accountable. During a November 2023 Republican primary debate, Ramaswamy stopped the political world cold when he said out loud what many voters have long known to be the truth.

“Think about who’s moderating this debate,” Ramaswamy said on the debate stage in November. “This should be Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk—we’d have 10 times the viewership, asking questions that GOP primary voters actually care about, and bring in more people into our party.”

“We’ve got Kristen Welker here,” he continued. “Do you think the Democrats would actually hire Greg Gutfeld to host a Democratic debate? They wouldn’t do it. And so the fact of the matter is, Kristen, I’m going to use this time—because this is actually about you and the media, and the corrupt media establishment—[to] ask you [about] the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that you pushed on this network for years. Was that real? Or was that Hillary Clinton made-up disinformation? Answer the question. Go.” The camera then panned to Welker, who awkwardly smiled and refused to answer Ramaswamy’s question as the crowd erupted in applause.

In taking this approach, Ramaswamy let a massive political genie out of the bottle and exposed why so many Republicans and Independent voters view not the Democrats, but the corporate media, as the real opposition party in American politics.

Thus this emerging dynamic in public opinion gives Vance a good opportunity to expose CBS’s role in perpetrating the era of media corruption and confront moderators Margaret Brennan (whose husband has come under fire for donating to the anti-Trump, scandal-ridden group, the Lincoln Project) and Norah O’Donnell on the matter of their own network’s shocking instances of violating journalistic ethics in the case of two of its trusted correspondents.

Thus, in asking Brennan and O’Donnell whether the network wishes to publicly atone for its most recent case of journalistic malpractice, Vance can mention the February 2024 firing of veteran investigative journalist Catherine Herridge and CBS’s shocking seizure of her files. Herridge thought it her duty to look into what has become the largest corruption scandal in U.S. history—a scandal that, in the range of its influence-peddling and shakedown operations of foreign governments over, for example, the release of foreign aid funds to Ukraine, saw a sitting Vice President of the United States use his office to enrich his family by tens of millions of dollars—and thus far exceeds in gravity and magnitude other historic scandals like Teapot Dome, Crédit Mobilier, or Watergate. Such actions in the past, as George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley has pointed out, led to felony prosecutions by Department of Justice. Even more appalling is the attempt by CBS and other networks to help the political class to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as Russian disinformation and then fix the case for the president’s son—a fix stopped only by the heroism of two IRS whistleblowers and a federal judge who refused to accept a sweetheart deal given the younger Biden.

Though the persecution of Herridge by CBS executives who were angry at her for embarrassing them with their friends and allies in the Harris-Biden administration and her abrupt departure from the network has garnered some attention in the media, it is particularly noteworthy because it serves as a climactic endpoint to another shocking CBS newsroom firing of a female reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, who also bucked the trend of corporate media’s fierce protection of politicians like Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

Indeed, a word about the Obama era is in order here in view of its relevance to any CBS-sponsored event such as Tuesday’s debate since it marked the network’s first full-on collusion with government and politicians. An earlier generation of news staff at CBS would have been appalled at the thought that the organization once dubbed “the Tiffany Network” had become a network whose newsroom was being run by the brother of fanatical anti-Trumper and former Obama aide Ben Rhodes, and who tried to crush a reporter like Sharyl Attkisson for exposing the truth about the greatest lie ever told to the American public in a moment of national crisis, one far worse in its deliberateness and planning than the Johnson administration’s lie about the Tonkin Gulf incident to Congress.

Attkisson, who worked for CBS for more than two decades, left the network when it stopped reporting on the Benghazi attack weeks before the 2012 presidential election in efforts to protect then-President Obama’s reelection prospects. The attack, which claimed the lives of four American officials or contractors stationed in Libya, exposed a prolonged period of deceit by the Obama administration, spanning more than five days. Many in the corporate media fervently echoed these falsehoods, adamantly insisting that the attack was not orchestrated by radical Islamic terrorist groups but rather attributed to a YouTube video. However, internal communications revealed that administration officials were aware of the true nature of the attack. Hillary Clinton even sent an email acknowledging the deception, Susan Rice appeared on television spreading the false narrative despite knowing it wasn’t true, and numerous other officials were complicit. Nevertheless, the media enthusiastically continued to propagate these falsehoods, compounding the deception.

To another generation of network executives, it would have been unthinkable to bar a story of such magnitude just weeks before an election. “Many in the media,” Attkisson wrote, “are wrestling with their own souls.” She continued: “Some worry that the news coverage will hurt a cause that they personally believe in. They’re all too eager to dismiss damaging documentary evidence while embracing, sometimes unquestioningly, the Obama administration’s ever-evolving and unproven explanations.”

Following her departure from CBS, Attkisson went on to publish Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, in which she detailed her executives’ rejection of “stories that the Obama Administration dismissed” and outlined the increasing “decline of investigative journalism and unbiased truth telling in America today.”

CBS was not alone, of course, in abandoning its journalistic soul to cover for Obama. One of NBC’s most respected reporters, Lisa Meyers, left the network after it refused—in another classic instance of network newsroom corruption—to air her revelations about deliberate administration lies regarding Obamacare, the single largest piece of domestic legislation since the Social Security Act. The network wanted no part of the evidence Meyers had gathered showing that the administration knew well the falsehood of its claims that its plan would allow Americans to save $2,500 a year in health costs and keep their own private plans or doctors. While the real turning point toward a culture of network news executives actively trying to cover up stories for their political friends or allies and silencing reporters who were trying to do their jobs occurred during the Obama era, no discussion of the current state of network news and the upcoming CBS vice presidential debate can be complete without noting one earlier newsroom cultural shift that began all the trouble. This shift occurred when networks began hiring for key Washington positions—not reporters with journalistic experience, but Democrat Party Capitol Hill aides or campaign operatives like Tim Russert, who had served as an aide to liberal New York Mayor Mario Cuomo and Patrick Moynihan, George Stephanopoulos, a key Clinton campaign and White House staffer who, even while at ABC, gave undisclosed donations to the Clinton Foundation and participated in morning strategy calls with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and advisor James Carville, and Chuck Todd, a former Senator Tom Harkin staffer whose on-air pumping up of Democrat Party hopes in any given election is only exceeded in boldness by his financial ties as a landlord to Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, a frequent guest on his show.

Thus, the current ethical wasteland at the networks seems to have initially stemmed from these hires and would eventually lead, in the Trump era, to a willingness to collude with Democrats in promulgating rather than exposing the most remarkable political dirty trick in American history—the Clinton campaign’s million-dollar, successful effort to collude with the FBI and Department of Justice in the Russian hoax that Trump had ties to the Russian government. The media never explained, never apologized. And this is not to mention the staggering wave of false prosecutions, censorship, and violations of civil liberties engaged in by the Biden administration and its Justice Department against political opponents—just the sort of government censorship and oppression, including the pattern of harassing or even imprisoning dissenters that in another era would have infuriated journalists of any political persuasion and led to countless exposes.

Thus, the problem for Vance in Tuesday’s debate—but also the opportunity—is that he will face moderators who are deeply in the grip of this decades-long decline in network ethics and professionalism and who may not even be able to process the idea that they have biases that can cost them and their network dearly. ABC moderator David Muir’s distortion, for example, of Trump’s January 6th speech—during which he left out Trump’s call for a “peaceful” Capitol Hill demonstration—was the sort of falsification by omission that could have gotten a reporter fired in earlier times. So too Muir’s ridiculous repetition of the falsehood that Trump called the Charlottesville neo-Nazi demonstrators “very fine people” shows the kind of inwardness that can be professionally suicidal. One wonders if it ever occurred to Muir that in his false fact-checking, he himself might be called out for dishonesty.

Expect then that the corporate media networks’ addiction to partisan activism will be on display this Tuesday, and that is why the playbook offered by Vivek Ramaswamy in last year’s debate—and regularly presented by Vance during his media appearances, as well as in John Nolte’s famous Breitbart list of media fabrications—might help lead eventually to a much-needed restoration of journalistic ethics and a return of the media’s credibility in the eyes of the American public.

Polls now consistently find that Americans’ trust in the media is plummeting to frighteningly low levels, a process unlikely to be reversed until reporters of integrity like Herridge and Attkisson can wrestle newsrooms back from the activist executives and “suits in the suites” currently running the news shows.

Vance calling out CBS on its own journalistic scandals could be a big step forward.

Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.