May 19, 2025

CBS NEWS EMBROILED IN YET MORE SCANDAL AS TOP BOSS STEPS DOWN WITH VERY TENSE STATEMENT:

CBS News’ CEO Wendy McMahon has announced she’s quitting the network – with a tense statement hinting at her unhappiness at the newsroom’s current state.

McMahon, 50, made her departure known in a Monday memo to staffers – one that made clear she was taking a stand against Donald Trump and a lawsuit alleging CBS News exhibits bias.

The maneuver was first reported by The New York Times, three months after insiders first said McMahon was set to lose her job.

Both she and now-former 60 Minutes boss Owens opposed Paramount heiress Shari Redstone’s plans to settle a $20billion dollar suit being brought by the president that alleges an October 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was deceptively edited.

A settlement appears to be the sticking point for the Skydance deal to go through – leaving Owens and and McMahon in higher-ups’ crosshairs.

‘It’s become clear that the company and I do not agree on the path forward,’ McMahon wrote Monday as a result.

‘It’s time for me to move on and for this organization to move forward with new leadership.’

‘Today, I am stepping down from my position as president and CEO of CBS News and Stations,’ McMahon told her team, calling the less than two-year stint plagued by poor ratings ‘one of the most meaningful chapters in [her] career.’

More details here: CBS News President Resigns amid Feud with Trump.

McMahon took over CBS News in August 2023 and oversaw numerous controversies during her brief time as head of the network. Redstone rebuked McMahon when CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil drew the ire of progressive staffers for lightly challenging author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s inflammatory claims about the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Dokoupil was subject to ritualistic humiliation internally for the Coates interview and eventually succumbed to the pressure with an emotional apology.

Former CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge has criticized the network for censoring her attempts to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story and squashing a live interview with billionaire Elon Musk. CBS laid off Herridge last year and she now runs an independent newsletter.

Paramount is also seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission for its merger with Skydance Media, a blockbuster transaction the agency has spent months reviewing. The FCC and Paramount recently began discussions about the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, among other conditions for the FCC to allow the merger to take place.

As Bob Hoge writes at Red State, “another one bites the dust at CBS News. They thoroughly earned this ongoing humiliation, however, so I shed not a single tear for them.”

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll 7

THIS IS CNN:

It’s (D)ifferent when Anderson Cooper does it.

Posted at 12:53 pm by Stephen Green 23

MIRANDA DEVINE:

Full text:

Seriously, has anyone listened to the whole Hur audio? The establishment takeout that this is just about Joe Biden having pudding for brains is lazy and misses the deeper point, which is that the prosecutors had him cold on possessing classified documents he had no right to keep.

Biden lies and dissembles and filibusters and goes vague and mumbly at all the crucial points, with the help of lawyer Bob Bauer, who interrupts every time Joe might incriminate himself and laughs like a hyena when Joe gets feisty or cracks a sarcastic joke at the prosecutors’ expense.

It is vintage Biden, nasty, smarmy, and self aggrandizing. He tries to impress the lawyers in the room with exaggerated highlights of his subpar legal career. At one point he boasts about spending Thanksgiving in Nantucket handwriting a memo about Afghanistan to Obama to try to “save his ass”. Delusions of grandeur.

You can hear the prosecutors’ frustration – they’re in a straitjacket and with a strict time limit. He reminds them out of the gate that he has just been on the phone to Bibi Netanyahu talking about the Oct. 7 attack – the previous day — just so they know they are keeping him from more important business.

Bottom line is he absurdly lies throughout. He denies having kept classified material for his personal use. It is not something he would ever do because he’s so upright and honorable.

And yet the prosecutors found reams of it tucked away everywhere in his house, garage, and Penn Center office, along with Biden’s recorded admission to his ghostwriter that he had found classified material in his basement he could use for his memoir.

So they had a dilemma. Do they charge the sitting president and label him a pathological liar, causing a massive scandal and constitutional crisis? Or do they use his age and mental fog as an excuse not to charge him? Pretty clear which was the easier path.

“Easier,” not “better” or “correct.”

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green 26

EDITH WILSON SMILES: Joe Biden Breaks Silence on Cancer Diagnosis as Rumors Swirl over Announcement Timing.

Joe Biden broke his silence after his office revealed Sunday that the former president is battling an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer.

Biden, 82, posted a selfie with his wife Jill and their cat on social media, expressing gratitude for the well wishes he received.

“Cancer touches us all. Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support,” Biden wrote in the caption.

It’s 2025. Why are we assuming that Joe actually wrote that? Biden family insider exposes culture of concealment in former administration.

Biden family insider Michael LaRosa opened up about the former administration’s culture of concealment while speaking to Fox News on Sunday, telling “FOX & Friends Weekend” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy that the people surrounding the former president during his tenure in the White House were unwilling to be transparent.

“This was a group in the White House who were allergic to transparency, and I’m talking about just in the East Wing,” he said. “The very first day walking into the White House, the usher was fired, and I couldn’t get reporters straight answers, because nobody would give me straight answers.”

Biden family insider Michael LaRosa opened up about the former administration’s culture of concealment while speaking to Fox News on Sunday, telling “FOX & Friends Weekend” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy that the people surrounding the former president during his tenure in the White House were unwilling to be transparent.

“This was a group in the White House who were allergic to transparency, and I’m talking about just in the East Wing,” he said. “The very first day walking into the White House, the usher was fired, and I couldn’t get reporters straight answers, because nobody would give me straight answers.”

Last year Niall Ferguson wrote, “We’re All Soviets Now:”

Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.

But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, but he had suffered his first major stroke seven years before. Andropov was only 68 when he succeeded Brezhnev, but he suffered total kidney failure just a few months after taking over. Chernenko was 72 when he came to power. He was already a hopeless invalid, suffering from emphysema, heart failure, bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia.

And like the Soviet Union bad news is just another excuse to continue the omerta: Dem strategist David Axelrod says criticism of Biden’s mental decline should be ‘muted’ amid cancer diagnosis as timing of announcement questioned.

And right on cue: Brian Stelter: Cancer Diagnosis Should ‘Pause’ Scrutiny of Joe Biden’s Cognitive Decline.

John Podhoretz adds: Biden and His Palace Court.

And in the end, of course, Biden isn’t the villain of the story told in the book being released tomorrow. The bad guys here are the people around him, and the Democratic cognitive elite from both inside the administration and out. Either they knew he was too out of it to serve as president and covered it up, which is criminal and means they should never again be allowed anywhere near a position of authority, or they deluded themselves into thinking otherwise, which means they were fools who should never be allowed anywhere near a position of authority. Anyway you slice it, they should never be anywhere near power ever again. This means you, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. And you, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. And you, Chief of Staff Jeffrey Zients. You propped up an infirm man, and maybe a man you knew to be suffering from cancer, to keep yourselves in power.

Now, Jill Biden will have no way to be anywhere near power, but she is clearly the central player in this melodrama, and the question for the future is: Who will tell that story?

When do we start seeing books about the Biden administration that actually name names?

UPDATE:

As someone who replied to Mehta suggests, “[It] Would not surprise me if it turns out the traits we saw as cognitive decline were exacerbated by cancer treatment.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 64

JESSE SINGAL: Of Course Liberal Institutions Are Engaging In Illegal Hiring Practices On The Basis Of Race: And of course this will turn out to have been a very bad idea. “Lucas notes that until recently Harvard touted, right on its website, the reduction in the proportion of white male faculty members. . . . I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if the Trump administration does engage in a thorough investigation here, it is unlikely to come away empty-handed.”

Posted at 12:29 pm by Glenn Reynolds 17

SORRY, BUT YOU LOST ME AT “FUNCTIONING LEGACY MEDIA”:

PSA tests are actually less common for men over 70 for various reasons, but I find it difficult to believe that POTUS isn’t screened for pretty much everything.

Posted at 11:52 am by Stephen Green 43

JAMES VARNEY: Wasting Away in Wind-and-Solarville.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste.

“Nobody planned on this, nobody had a plan to get rid of them, nobody planned for closure,” said Dwight Clark, whose company, Solar E Waste Solutions, recycles solar panels. “Nobody thought this through.”

The discussion about what to do with worn-out solar and wind equipment is another topic usually elided in Net Zero blueprints, which often focus on the claimed benefits of projects while discounting or ignoring the costs. As RealClearInvestigations previously reported regarding the lack of plans for acquiring the massive amounts of land for solar and wind farms needed to achieve net zero, the math can get fuzzy, and the numbers cited most frequently are those rosiest for renewables.

“They’ve been either silent, or incoherent – or just hand-wave that we should recycle all this stuff without telling us how,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics. In the headlong effort to make solar and wind seem as inexpensive as possible, they have not included fees that address the eventual cost of disposal, which could leave taxpayers holding the bag.

Could?

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green 124