The tragic end of CBS News

Another trusted source of information bites the dust under Trump

Robert Reich

Feb 12, 2026

Friends,

Producer Alicia Hastey departed CBS News Wednesday, saying the kind of work she came to do was “increasingly becoming impossible,” as stories were now evaluated “not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of idealogical expectations.”

Whose ideological expectations was Hastey referring to? Would it be impertinent for me to suggest it’s the sociopath in the Oval Office?

Hastey’s criticism came a little over two weeks after Bari Weiss, the anti-“woke” opinion journalist who became editor-in-chief CBS’s News, unveiled her “21st century” vision at a town hall meeting. Weiss told producers and staff they were free to leave if they didn’t like it.

Since then, at least six out of CBS Evening News’s twenty producers have accepted buyouts.

At that town hall meeting Weiss also named a bunch of new contributors — including the anti-aging influencer Peter Attia. In the latest tranche of Epstein Files, Attia appears over 1,700 times, including an email in which he tells Epstein that “p—y is, indeed, low carb.”

In a missive to the newsroom, Weiss declared that “We love America” should be a guiding principle for the relaunch of the CBS Evening News.

Meanwhile, Weiss has replaced Evening News anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois with Tony Dokoupil — who was best known for hassling the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for his “extremist” belief that apartheid is morally wrong.

In one of his first broadcasts, Dokoupil accepted without question Israel’s justification for violating the terms of the ceasefire when it killed three journalists in Gaza, reporting only that “Israel said it was targeting a group operating a drone affiliated with Hamas.”

Weiss faced blowback in December when she shelved a “60 Minutes” report about Venezuelans being deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, hours before it was set to air.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, had accused CBS News of pulling it for “political” reasons. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” she wrote in a note to the CBS News Team. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

The segment later aired on Jan. 18, drawing in over 5 million viewers.

The story CBS posted about Renee Good’s killing in Minneapolis reported that “The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.”

No identifiable source was given for CBS’s assertion of “internal bleeding.” A CBS News staffer reported “huge internal concern” that the source was an anonymous leak by the Trump administration meant for an outlet they could trust to run it, no questions asked.

Weiss doesn’t exactly report to Donald Trump, of course. Trump runs CBS News the way he runs Venezuela — with a widely-understood threat that he’ll wreak havoc if it doesn’t do what he wants.

As Trump told Dokoupil recently in a rambling nearly 13-minute interview, if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election in 2024, “you probably wouldn’t have a job right now.”

Perhaps CBS News didn’t edit Dokoupil’s rambling interview with Trump because, moments after it ended, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt conveyed Trump’s threat that “‘if it’s not out in full, we’ll sue your ass off.’”

You see the way Trump now controls CBS News? Dokoupil is Bari Weiss’s newly-minted anchor. Bari Weiss is David Ellison’s newly-minted head of CBS News. David Ellison is his father’s (Larry Ellison) newly-minted head of Paramount, which is the new owner of CBS. Larry Ellison is a pal of Trump’s, who contributes to Trump’s super PAC. And Trump? He has the power to take the prized Warner Bros Discovery out of the clutches of Netflix and deliver it to Ellison.

Among David Ellison’s first moves at CBS was to gut DEI policies, appoint right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and appoint Weiss.

I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had responsibilities to the American public that transcended making money for CBS’s investors.

America can survive without a “60 Minutes” it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of the Washington Post — which Jeff Bezos has censored, and whose newsroom he just gutted.

But at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair.

**

Here, in contrast to the Trump suck-up CBS News has become, is the courageous CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow, from April 13, 1954.

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ANOTHER DUMP FROM TRUMP - STINKING UP THE JOINT

 

  

BONDI - JUST ANOTHER ONE OF TRUMP'S HOOKERS FROM AN EARLY AGE

 

Dear Pam Bondi, (A Letter From A Father)

John Pavlovitz

Feb 11, 2026

Dear Ms Bondi,

I’m writing to you as an American citizen, a former pastor, and the father of a daughter.

I spent today, as much of the nation, watching you speak before the House Judiciary Committee in a state of stunned disbelief, which surprised me, as I thought you’d reached a moral bottom many weeks ago.

I witnessed you posturing and protesting, feigning indignation in the face of reasonable questions you repeatedly refused to answer.

I looked on as you deflected and pivoted, performing the wildest verbal gymnastics to keep from providing the simple clarity that our elected representatives asked for and deserved—and wondered why anyone would do that.

I sat incredulous, watching you appear to lie with great ease, even perverse joy, seeming, to my ears, to contradict both irrefutable evidence and your own words in the past. It was a tour de force in distraction, a true masterclass in gaslighting.

And while a thousand thoughts ran through my head, when it was all over, I was left with a single question:

How does someone become Pam Bondi?

I’m not speaking about your education, your professional experience, or your career path, which are easily retrieved with a few keystrokes. I’m talking about the meandering road to losing one’s soul.

I wonder how an apparently intelligent human being finds themselves sitting in that chair in front of the watching world in a moment of such gravity, so completely bereft of empathy, so seemingly unencumbered by other people’s suffering, and so strident in the face of simple accountability.

I try to imagine how you, the person entrusted with stewarding the Law in the highest seat of power here, arrives at a place where that Law has seemingly become irrelevant.

Are the money and the power so intoxicating that they have rendered your conscience inoperable?

Has your journey been filled with a million small moral compromises that burdened you in the beginning, but slowly emotionally anesthetized you to the point that now you feel nothing?

Are you so beholden to the redacted man who enabled your ascension to this lofty space that you are willing to shield him from the litany of heinous sins that you must know well he is guilty of?

Maybe you don’t even have the answers.

Maybe you can’t explain it either, though I’m sure there’s a story you have to tell yourself to keep the self-loathing at bay and let you sleep at night, at least I hope so.

I see that you do not have children of your own. Perhaps if you did, you might see this all differently, I don’t know. It certainly shouldn’t take that, though.

But you are someone’s daughter, and I do wonder how that girl became the woman sitting there at that table today, so dismissive of other women who have survived trauma. I imagine there may be some answers there somewhere.

But as the father of a daughter, I want you to know that I fully detest what you are doing to so many other people’s children right now.

I abhor your callous disregard for the daughters who stood courageously before you today, whose eyes you did not have the dignity to look into; women whose black, cavernous hell you know full well, because you’ve pored over it countless times in words, photos, and videos that are still being concealed.

It sickens me to my core to know that thousands of survivors, girls and young women not unlike my daughter, have experienced unspeakable horrors and are finding in you, not a fierce and willing advocate, not a steadfast warrior who will deliver them justice, but an unsuspecting, shame-throwing avatar of the men who brutalized them.

And if you truly do care for survivors, then I’d like to hear how you justify your treatment of them. They deserve that. We all do.

I’m not sure what you believe in, but I am a person of faith, and my religious tradition tells me that we will all face accountability for our misdeeds and transgressions beyond this life, even if we evade them in this one. That possibility does provide a small bit of comfort, but I hope you don’t have to wait that long.

I hope that you will face a legal reckoning for any betrayals of our nation that you are guilty of, for the chaos you are willfully creating, and most of all for the sorrow you are exacerbating for the daughters (and the sons) throughout this nation who feel less safe and less protected.

I stand with and bear witness to those who are afraid because the Law seems to be refusing to drag the monsters out into the light, because people like you appear so willing to curate the darkness.

I hope whatever you got for your soul was worth it to you.

It sure as hell isn’t for the rest of us.