The day that CBS News became literally ‘fake news’ for America

It wasn’t the most clever joke ever told on U.S. primetime television — not even close — when comedian Nikki Glaser took a swing at CBS News while hosting Hollywood’s Golden Globe Awards, which were seen live by an estimated 8.7 million viewers and clipped on social media by millions more. But the blow still landed hard, especially since the awards aired on CBS.

“The award for most editing goes to CBS News,” Glaser quipped, in a seeming reference to the recent flap over a critical report on the Donald Trump regime’s use of a Salvadoran torture prison was spiked by 60 Minutes. “Yes. CBS News: America’s newest place to ‘see B.S.’ news.”

Just three days later, Glaser’s joke about CBS News and its new, right-leaning management became a painful reality for a nation still reeling from the shock of an ICE agent fatally gunning down a 37-year-old mom behind the wheel of her family SUV on a Minneapolis street.

Last Wednesday, the network rushed out a report — sourced only to two unnamed “U.S. officials” — that the ICE agent who fired the shot, Jonathan Ross, “suffered internal bleeding to the torso” in his Jan. 7 deadly encounter with the driver who was pulling away from the scene, Renee Nicole Good.

What that report from what was once the most trusted TV newsroom in America seemed to imply — even though it did not explicitly state — was that Good’s Honda Pilot must have struck Ross in the encounter that touched off days of protests in Minneapolis and around the nation. If that did happen, it would radically alter the debate about the shooting and the violent nature of ICE’s deportation raids — creating an argument that the use of deadly force was justified.

I want to be careful here because the CBS story was so vague that it’s as hard to disprove as it is to prove. Medical experts immediately noted the report could have been misleading — at best — since “internal bleeding” could mean a bruise, which might have been caused in the chaotic situation by something besides Good’s vehicle. But two reports just hours after the CBS bulletin suggested something far worse — a whiff of the utter baloney that Glaser had just joked about.

First, the New York Times released an in-depth frame-by-frame analysis of the multiple videos of the shooting captured both by citizen observers and by Ross himself as he fired his gun. The Times concluded from the analysis that “the currently available visual evidence still shows no indication agent Jonathan Ross got run over” and published a photo showing significant daylight between the SUV and the agent as he fired.

Second, a Minneapolis Police Department report on the shooting was released, stating that Ross — who was shown on video walking around in the aftermath without any overt sign of an injury — was not taken to a hospital, as Trump had told the nation in a Truth Social post on the day of the killing. The police said Ross was driven to a government building.

Or, a different way of looking at the CBS “internal bleeding” report is in the context of Sherlock Holmes’ famous crime-solving line about the dog that did not bark. An entire pack of hounds stayed silent on this one. The facts that most editors would demand before airing such an explosive claim about the biggest story in America — a medical report, or a quote from Ross’ doctor, or even a family member or an ICE colleague — weren’t published. Just the unsupported words of two officials from an authoritarian U.S. regime with a growing record for lying.

Indeed, it didn’t take long for the dismay from actual professional journalists — the ones who still work at CBS after its late 2025 takeover by a media conglomerate owned by pro-Trump billionaires — to pour out in leaks.

Most of the journalists’ consternation centered on the actions of Bari Weiss, the conservative public intellectual who has been installed as the editor-in-chief of CBS News — despite possessing almost no previous breaking news experience.

“There was big internal dissension about the ‘internal bleeding’ report here last night,” a CBS News staffer who was granted anonymity told The Guardian. “It was viewed as a thinly veiled, anonymous leak by [the Trump administration] to someone who’d carry it online.”

A second insider told the news organization that it “felt to many here like we were carrying water for [the administration’s ] justifying of the shooting to keep our access to our sources.” The Guardian’s sources said Weiss had personally pushed to get the piece published quickly online.

So far all the factual, on-the-ground journalism from Minneapolis suggests that CBS News, which has stood atop the pyramid of mainstream American media for decades, has just committed one of the worst acts of bad journalism in U.S. history.

The worst? That’s a high bar, considering other historic missteps like Judith Miller’s later debunked New York Times reporting on alleged Iraqi chemical weapons that bolstered the dishonest case for war, and which was also rooted in boosting government fictions.

But with approval for ICE, Trump’s immigration policies and the president himself reeling after Good’s killing, and a flood of viral videos showing violent actions by government agents in Minnesota, any aid for a White House campaign to rewrite history is appalling. It could be used by the Trump regime to bolster a case for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending troops to Minnesota, which would cause the simmering crisis of American democracy to boil over.

A CBS News spokesperson told The Independent that the network “went through its rigorous editorial process and decided it was reportable based on the reporting, the reporters, and the sourcing.” It should be noted that ABC News ran a nearly identical story shortly after the CBS report. The parent companies of both CBS and ABC reached multi-million dollar settlements of questionable lawsuits by Trump at the start of his presidency rather than fight them in court.

The CBS report did not happen in a vacuum. There was a reason, after all, that Hollywood’s elites guffawed when Glaser told her “see B.S.” joke. And it went even deeper than the recent bruhaha over Weiss’ last-minute postponement of the 60 Minutes report on the mistreatment of U.S. deportees in the Salvadoran prison, supposedly because she believed it needed more reporting and more input from the Trump regime.

Critics noted the slow-motion impeding of that story that was so damaging to the White House was the polar opposite of the rushed Minneapolis “internal bleeding” story that was desired by the regime. It’s also come out that a second in-the-works 60 Minutes piece that could make Trump’s government look bad — about its preference for white South African refugees — has also been delayed by intense edits.

This is exactly what many feared last year when the Trump regime greenlighted the sale of CBS’-then-parent Paramount to Skydance Media owned by David Ellison, son of Trump-supporting Silicon Valley billionaire Larry Ellison, and when the new owner brought in Weiss, a former New York Times opinion journalist whose right-leaning site Free Press — also bought by Ellison — is popular with the super-wealthy.

It became almost a cliché to point out how the new team has threatened the storied legacy of CBS News and the iconic moments its star journalists had questioned authority, including Edward R. Murrow’s 1954 takedown of red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy or Walter Cronkite’s 1968 call for a Vietnam withdrawal that infuriated Lyndon Johnson’s White House.

But already the new reality of CBS News as a kind of a state media for the Trump era has been worse than anyone could have feared, now creating “fake news” in the term’s original clear-eyed meaning and not its bastardization by Trump’s MAGA movement.

Weiss’ handpicked anchor, Tony Dokoupil, set the tone when he declared the new CBS News wanted to listen to everyday Americans and not put so much stock in experts — presumably like the doctors who could have told them the “internal bleeding” story didn’t make sense. In the immediate aftermath of Good’s killing, Dokoupil delivered a mush-mouthed “both sides” monologue that surely set Cronkite and Murrow spinning in their graves.

» READ MORE: 50 years ago, Walter Cronkite told America the bitter truth. We need more Cronkites today | Will Bunch

That was almost as embarrassing as Dokoupil’s 13-minute interview with Trump in which the president said the quiet part about the new slant at CBS News out loud, telling the anchor that if Kamala Harris had won in 2024 instead of Trump, “You wouldn’t have this job, certainly whatever the hell they’re paying you.”

That was not edited out of the interview when it aired on CBS Evening News — perhaps because, it later came out, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Dokoupil and his crew that the president demanded all 13 minutes must be broadcast without changes or “we’ll sue your asses off.”

CBS clearly complied. Of course it did. In a matter of weeks, the storied CBS eye logo has become a knowing wink to an autocratic U.S. government. The changes at CBS, and their implications for American democracy, have somewhat been lost in the recent tsunami of unthinkable headlines like the unrest in Minnesota, the bombing and regime change in Venezuela, and Trump’s once-unthinkable threats against Greenland.

But we can’t ignore this. The 4 million or so Americans who watch Dokoupil and the CBS Evening News every weeknight might be a huge drop from Cronkite’s era when three TV networks dominated the landscape, but many of those folks — older, less politically obsessed, often swing voters — are vital to the future of democracy.

The success of Trump’s strongman project — just like the prior century of dictatorships that have paved the way for this — depends on creating alternative realities for the true believers and a cloud of uncertainty for the rest of us. The goal is to convince the mass of people that truth is fungible — except for what is dictated by the leader.

The only “internal bleeding” we can confirm with any certainty is the battered and visibly bruised reputation of a newsroom that was once a bulwark of press freedom, as well as America’s run-over democracy. OK, that’s kind of an obvious observation, but maybe Glaser can use it if CBS lets her host the Golden Globes again next year.

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