Sharyn Alfonsi represents the overweening pomposity of the hard-left partisans who have ruled CBS News. She responded to Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss with "resistance" lingo when her contract was not renewed.
"This was not a routine corporate transition; it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom," Alfonsi lectured in a statement. "CBS management is ... choosing access journalism over accountability and protecting power rather than scrutinizing it."
Several of these bitter proclamations are unintentionally hilarious. She describes her own crusading jeremiads against Trump and the Republicans as "factually accurate," and anybody tapping the brakes and suggesting she include a word from Team Trump is "sanitizing" her righteous facts.
Then there's "choosing access journalism over accountability." Alfonsi's been working for "60 Minutes," which she insists is Exhibit A of Fearlessly Independent Reporting. It's like this lady has never watched this show, as it coddled both Clintons, buttered up Bidens and treated Barack Obama like they'd just hiked up to Mount Olympus on a pilgrimage.
Even as Alfonsi celebrates fearless independence, former first lady Jill Biden was granted an interview with mostly retired CBS reporter Rita Braver for "CBS Sunday Morning." She claimed she feared her husband was having a stroke during his presidential debate fiasco in 2024. There couldn't be more pop in her poppycock, but CBS is broadcasting it to the world — "access journalism," not investigation.
In a promotional pitch on "CBS Evening News," anchorman Tony Dokoupil presented the poppycock without objection: "For the first time, former first lady Jill Biden is saying what was going through her head as she watched her husband's disastrous performance in that 2024 presidential debate." CBS didn't recall the reality — how Mrs. Biden came out of that debate gushing like a 73-year-old pom-pom girl.
Then there was CBS correspondent Ed O'Keefe being granted 15 minutes of access to James Talarico, the hard-left Senate Democrat nominee from Texas. He wasted much of it with softball questions like, "Why are Republicans so worried about this race?"
Then, when it came to Talarico's sticky wicket of wacky claims about God, O'Keefe gently nudged: "So, they're running a handful of highlights of things you've said in the past and I wanted to give you an opportunity to respond or clarify. In 2021, in a speech during a debate over transgender issues, you said, "God is nonbinary." What did you mean by that?"
This isn't the way CBS interviews Republicans, with that journalistic-butler tone of "I want to give you an opportunity to clarify." It sounds like "let me help you defuse Republican critiques."
On the same "Evening News" with the Jill Biden promo, O'Keefe summarized: "Talarico is a seminarian who calls himself a Christian progressive. The Republicans call him a radical for comments like this when discussing transgender rights." Then he played Talarico's proclamation that "God is nonbinary," right next to his answer to O'Keefe: "I think I was being intentionally provocative with that statement."
Then, the newscast included his gentle follow-up: "Do you regret describing it that way, or talking about God that way?" Talarico vaguely said, "There are some statements that I have made that I certainly regret. But Ken Paxton is intentionally clipping my cringy comments to distract from his career of corruption."
Reporters like Alfonsi insist that they're the hard-hitters, and never the soft-ballers. They're the courageous independents who hold people accountable, and never the shoe-polishing partisans who allow their political allies to uncork ridiculous spins without challenge.
They are lying to themselves and to us.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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