I can only imagine that Walter Cronkite, the esteemed icon of CBS News who presided over many earth-shattering events, is gyrating wildly in his grave, and the still-alive Dan Rather is weeping deeply. The reason should be clear to anyone who has tuned in to CBS News since Trump-enthusiast Bari Weiss (she of 60 Minutes infamy) chose Tony Dokoupil to be the new anchor of its evening broadcast. Dokoupil's first appearance in that position came on Saturday, where he enjoyed a 30-minute interview of Pete Hegseth following Amerika's invasion of Venezuela.
The session was a nauseating exercise in extreme sycophancy as the anchor acted as the second banana to the Secretary of War. The tone was set with his opening remarks, which went along the lines of Dokoupil expressing relief to Hegseth that no American lives were lost during the 'operation'. Other gifts to Hegseth included his asking whether there would be American troops staying long-term to "stabilize the [Venezuelan] government. Conspicuously absent were any questions about the legitimacy of the invasion.
And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Referencing the above interview, Daniel D'Addario says it was an unchallenging interview
in which the administration’s perspective was aired so thoroughly as to raise the question of when an interview becomes a press release.
Then, in Monday's broadcast,
Dokoupil blandly stated to the camera that a Russian-Chinese-Iranian base of influence in Venezuela will be destabilized by the U.S. military action, without citing any source or consulting any guest...
As well,
a brief interview with a financial expert about how the events in South America will affect the price of gasoline never broached the notion of whether the U.S. extracting Venezuelan petroleum is legal.
One of the most disquietly segments of last night's broadcast was his interview with Doctor John Lapook about new guidelines issued by Bobby Kennedy regarding childhood vaccines:
Dokoupil began... by asking what this expert would say to “parents out there who are celebrating,” because they thought their kids were obliged to be injected with too many vaccines. He ended the segment by declaring “So, parents are going to have some options for themselves!”
You can watch a clip of the above here.
D'Addario ends his piece with a prediction that CBS will continue to occupy the basement in network news ratings:
Thankfully, just like parents, viewers have some options for themselves — and few, it seems likely, will choose this reboot. The hypothetical viewer who wishes their news were pitched at a more conservative tenor is super-served by Fox News and Newsmax...
People who have read this blog for a time will know that I have long been a supporter of MSM. To say that faith has been shaken over the past few years is perhaps to state the obvious, but just as many others have done, I am finding more and more relevance in alternative media sites readily available on YouTube. Yet I must confess to a sadness that objective news reporting in any form is increasingly becoming a thing of the past.
