by Joseph Klein
Renowned journalist Catherine Herridge violated the Woke Party Line.
[Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
CBS, the once highly respected “Tiffany Network,” began its noticeable turn to the left in its news department when Dan Rather became the news anchor for the CBS Evening News in 1981. CBS News has been trending left ever since, with a few exceptions.
One of those exceptions was hiring Catherine Herridge in 2019, a renowned investigative journalist who had previously reported for Fox News. She is the rare journalist these days who objectively digs deeply into the facts underlying her stories before she reports what she has learned to her viewers and does so without fear or favor. Ms. Herridge is also courageously standing up for her First Amendment rights as she faces potential contempt of court charges by refusing to disclose her confidential sources for a story that she had worked on while at Fox News.
However, Catherine Herridge’s days became numbered at CBS following the appointment last August of Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, a woke executive, to serve as the president of CBS News. Ms. Ciprian-Matthews is CBS News’s highest-ranking woman of color who is fully committed to the woke ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has served for example, on the Global Inclusion Advisory Committee led by the President and Chief Executive Officer of Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company.
Ms. Ciprian-Matthews has been accused in the past of sidelining current white employees and prospective employees in an effort to advance the prospects of persons of color. In one instance reported by the New York Post, “a white job candidate claimed Ciprian-Matthews told her it would be easier to hire her if she were a ‘different color’ as she passed her over.”
In keeping with this leftwing, identity group mindset, Ms. Ciprian-Matthews clashed with CBS News’s senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge over her reporting. Ms. Herridge is an aggressive white journalist and anything but woke in her reporting – qualities that must have ruffled Ms. Ciprian-Matthews’ feathers.
Paramount Global’s mass layoff of eight hundred employees overall provided the perfect pretext for CBS News under Ms. Ciprian-Matthews’ leadership to summarily terminate Ms. Herridge’s employment on February 13th. She was one of just twenty CBS News employees who lost their jobs out of a pool of more than one thousand CBS News employees.
Adding insult to injury, CBS News reportedly held onto her files and her work laptop to examine them before being returned to Ms. Herridge, jeopardizing the confidentiality of her sources. Departing journalists normally take all their files with them immediately without interference. Now, days after CBS News let Ms. Herridge go, CBS News is reported to have finally returned the notes to Ms. Herridge that it improperly seized in the first place, giving CBS executives time beforehand to scour them.
While not publicly commenting herself on CBS News’s actions against her, Ms. Herridge shared on X a union statement that condemned “CBS News’ decision to seize Catherine Herridge’s reporter notes and research from her office, including confidential source information.”
“She got rid of her enemies under the guise of budget cuts,” according to one source, referring to Ms. Ciprian-Matthews, as quoted by the New York Post,
But Ms. Ciprian-Matthews’ own enmity towards Catherine Herridge is only part of the story. There was concern within the senior ranks of CBS about the recent subject matter of Ms. Herridge’s reporting that cast President Biden and his family in an unfavorable light.
Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro Chair of public interest law at George Washington University Law School and a legal commentator, wrote a column for The Hill in which he noted that the “timing of Herridge’s termination immediately raised suspicions in Washington. She was pursuing stories that were unwelcomed by the Biden White House and many Democratic powerhouses, including the Hur report on Joe Biden’s diminished mental capacity, the Biden corruption scandal and the Hunter Biden laptop. She continued to pursue these stories despite reports of pushback from CBS executives, including CBS News President Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews.”
The House Judiciary Committee is initiating an investigation into the circumstances of Ms. Herridge’s termination and seizure of her files. It sent a letter February 23rd to CBS News President Ciprian-Matthews, the New York Post reported, demanding that “the network reveal who at CBS or parent-company Paramount Global ‘made the decision to terminate’ Herridge.” The letter also inquired into the reason for the seizure of Ms. Herridge’s confidential files and who at CBS and its parent company Paramount Global had access to them. “The unprecedented actions of CBS News threaten to chill good journalism and ultimately weaken our nation’s commitment to a free press,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio declared in the letter.
The committee has requested documents and communications relating to Catherine Herridge’s materials that had been held at least temporarily by CBS News after she was terminated. The scope of this request should extend beyond any internal communications and include all emails and texts between CBS and/or Paramount Global personnel and the Biden White House and/or Biden campaign personnel. To close the circle, the committee should also request – and subpoena, if necessary – the Biden White House and campaign directly for all such communications in their possession.
The targeting of Ms. Herridge for the chopping block may have been linked, according to the New York Post, to her “recent reporting that President Biden may have kept evidence that he had foreign business dealings while in office.” Given Ms. Herridge’s track record, CBS News’s senior investigative correspondent would have kept on digging until she got to the bottom of the story, which could have meant curtains for the “Big Guy.”
CBS’s and Paramount Global’s top executives did not want to take the chance that CBS News would be blamed by President Biden and his supporters for helping to bring the president down. They were no doubt aware that the Biden White House and presidential campaign were already infuriated with reporting by some media outlets that they considered to be overly critical of President Biden and his family.
Last September, for example, the White House sent a letter to top U.S. news executives demanding that the media “ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.”
Complaining about press coverage of the Hur report including by CBS News, Ian Sams, the White House counsel’s office spokesperson, wrote a February 13th letter to the White House Correspondents Association president alleging “significant errors” in the reporting. And TJ Ducklo, a senior adviser for the Biden campaign, issued a statement on February 12th criticizing the media for “gratuitous and sensationalist attacks on the President’s age.”
The Biden White House’s Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates chastised the media for forgetting that “the rightwing age attacks they treat as novel are… old.” Mr. Bates also has a history of hostility against Catherine Herridge specifically, calling her a “right-wing hack” when he was Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign director of rapid response. Bates claimed back then that Ms. Herridge was “a regular conduit for conservative media manipulation ploys…”
Ms. Herridge “offense” was a scoop documenting then-Vice President Biden’s inclusion on a list of Obama administration officials requesting the “unmasking” of former national security adviser Michael Flynn who was referred to generically in a NSA foreign intelligence document. Reporting the truth made Ms. Herridge a “right-wing hack” in Andrew Bates’s eyes.
It is not unreasonable to expect that Andrew Bates would carry his personal animosity towards Ms. Herridge forward to his deputy press secretary job at the Biden White House.
The suspicions surrounding the timing of Catherine Herridge’s termination and seizure of her files are well-founded. CBS News, like other media outlets, was under pressure from the Biden White House and presidential campaign to cut their negative coverage of President Biden’s mental decline and of his family’s business dealings that could implicate the president himself. Ms. Herridge was offered up by CBS News as the perfect sacrificial lamb whom its woke president, Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews, had little use for anyway. A comprehensive congressional investigation into all this is imperative.
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer, and the author of Global Deception: The
UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack
Hussein Obama, The United Nations & Radical Islam.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/cbs-news-fires-its-senior-investigative-reporter-and-seizes-her-files/
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