TV News LIES

Former late-night comic David Letterman blasted his old network over a shift in its news coverage during the first year of President Trump’s second term.

“By the way, what about those idiots at CBS?” Letterman said as part of a video posted to his YouTube channel, a medium he has used to comment on current events in recent months since leaving network

“CBS News is a wreck,” he continued. “CBS News for decades … go back to World War II … Ed Murrow would be broadcasting the blitz of London from the rooftops of buildings in London. … That integrity of CBS News has been trampled on, pissed on and eviscerated by these idiots that have taken it over.”

Letterman said the recent changes at CBS are “hurting my feelings” and that he is “sick and tired” of progressives saying, “wait until those midterms,” countering “we’re far downstream of those midterms having an effect on this.”

The host’s comments were first highlighted by Mediaite.

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The worst thing about today's media environment is that — bad as it is — it is easy to imagine how things might get worse in 2026.

Traditional journalism outlets buffeted on all sides by misinformation, weak-kneed ownership and a hostile White House will struggle to earn back public trust even as the need for fair, accurate reporting grows.

Smaller groups of wealthy businesspeople control larger swaths of the country's information ecosystem, pitting their overall corporate interests against the public's desire for accurate journalism challenging powerful institutions in society.

And the biggest media deal of recent years is looming over everything, with ominous consequences for streaming, journalism, the film industry and consumers — no matter who finally closes on a purchase.

The real wild card here is the audience, which has more power than it realizes. The fall and rise of Jimmy Kimmel proved that viewers can make their preferences known in ways that preserve free expression, forcing media owners to show some backbone.

But the public will have to get more involved in 2026, weighing in with their viewing choices and their pocketbooks to make sure the options that bring the most freedom and ethical behavior are also the most profitable.

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CBS pulled a "60 Minutes" segment hours before it was set to air on Dec. 21, a move that has apparently sparked backlash from its correspondent.

The segment was set to feature the notorious El Salvador prison CECOT.

The news program announced the programming update in a statement around 4:30 p.m. ET on Dec. 21, adding that the piece "will air in a future broadcast."

"We determined it needed additional reporting," CBS News said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Sharyn Alfonsi, a correspondent who has worked at the network for more than two decades, reported the piece. Multiple outlets, including The New York Times, NPR and CNN, obtained an email Alfonsi sent to colleagues in which she said the decision to pull the segment "is not an editorial decision, it is a political one." USA TODAY has not been able to reach Alfonsi.

"60 Minutes," instead, aired a segment on a family of classical musicians, the programming update said. The show's social media comments have since been flooded with viewers calling on the network to release the original clip.

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The Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, admitted at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that there had been a political “sea change” and he no longer viewed the FCC as an independent agency. Commissioners, he says, serve at the pleasure of the president.

In his case, that president is Donald Trump, whose face Carr wears as a lapel pin, whose agenda he loudly embraces, and who often publicly demands that Carr censor his critics, including revoking their broadcast licenses.

Soon after Carr’s about-face, the agency quietly scrubbed references to its independence from its website.

Perhaps Carr believes in the unitary executive theory, under which agency heads essentially function like cabinet members. That’s fine. We’re not here to argue with him about administrative law. But he can’t have it both ways. You’re either an umpire calling balls and strikes or a political hack – you can’t be both.

If Carr believes the FCC is subservient to the president, then he is the last person who should be claiming the power to regulate journalists’ editorial decisions under the FCC’s “public interest” standard. By his own admission, he has every incentive to define the “public interest” in whatever manner pleases his boss.

The evidence bears this out. Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.

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On Thursday evening, as rumors about the Brown University gunman swirled, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.

CNN is certainly not a flawless news source, but her words rang true to me. The network is one of the outlets where you can find reality-based and largely dependable reporting – especially in breaking news situations like the one that was developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.

But CNN, now 45 years old, is in a precarious situation as two huge media conglomerates vie for ownership of its parent company, Warner Bros Discovery.

Whatever the outcome, the fate of CNN has become part of a high-stakes game of corporate ownership, not as a question of what benefits the information-seeking public.

America’s media system isn’t set up for that lofty goal. It’s set up for corporate profitability, for shareholder gain, for ever-increasing size and ever-decreasing competition.

“This is yet another example of the deep structural problems with roots in decades of policy decisions,” said Victor Pickard, author of Democracy Without Journalism? and a University of Pennsylvania media policy professor.

The speculation about who will own Warner Bros Discovery – will it be Netflix or Paramount Skydance? – misses a larger point.

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Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world eyewitness accounts of war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91.

Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, said his son Andrew Arnett. He had been suffering from prostate cancer.

"Peter Arnett was one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation — intrepid, fearless, and a beautiful writer and storyteller. His reporting in print and on camera will remain a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come," said Edith Lederer, who was a fellow AP war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-73 and is now AP's chief correspondent at the United Nations.

As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was known mostly to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the war's end in 1975. He became something of a household name in 1991, however, after he broadcast live updates for CNN from Iraq during the first Gulf War.

While almost all Western reporters had fled Baghdad in the days before the U.S.-led attack, Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining on the city, he broadcast a live account by cellphone from his hotel room.

"There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard," he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud boom of a missile strike rattled across the airwaves. As he continued to speak air-raid sirens blared in the background.

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