As reported by The New York Times and other fellow liberal media apologists, CBS News president Wendy McMahon announced Monday she quit as a sign of dismay and disgust with the network overlords moving toward a settlement with now-President Trump for 60 Minutes’s hatchet job of an October 2020 interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The president of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, was forced out of her post on Monday, the latest shock wave to hit the news division amid an ongoing showdown involving President Trump, ‘60 Minutes,’ and CBS’s parent company, Paramount,” wrote Times reporters Michael M. Grynbaum, Benjamin Mullin, and Lauren Hirsch.
Citing anonymous sources, they said McMahon was told “on Saturday” by “executives at Paramount...to step down” and so she told staff “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”
Her exit comes nearly a month after 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens similarly threw himself out the door that was heralded as a sacrifice in the name of honest journalism and the free press.
Trump sued CBS back on November 1, 2024 for what’s now $20 billion once it was revealed the network edited out one of Harris’s classic word salads while speaking to correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Middle East.
Since then, Paramount have seen fit to work towards a settlement with the now-President at the same time it’s angling for a sale to the media company, SkyDance (owned by David Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison) and have that sale approved by the Trump administration.
Earlier this year, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr declared he too was interested in investigating CBS’s conduct vis-à-vis their pre-election special given a broadcast network’s broader requirements to serve the public good versus, say, a cable channel.
“Many legal experts have called the suit baseless, but Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has said she favors settling the case,” The Times added.
In a version of the article last updated at 4:46 p.m. Eastern, they buried in paragraph ten any notion McMahon should be seen as sacrificing herself because “[w]ithin CBS News, it was widely expected that Ms. McMahon, who took over the news division in August 2023, would not be at the company much longer” and her Paramount bosses “had expressed concern about Ms. McMahon’s performance for months.”
Oh, there it is! Job performance (or lack thereof).
They continued, citing a hubbub last year about CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil being thrown before a Chinese Communist Party-style Struggle Session for the crime of asking tough questions of far-left, anti-Israel author Ta-Nehisi Coates (and sent Redstone to give Dokoupil a show of public support). That said, they left out McMahon as having been at the helm of the ship for what’s been a disastrous reboot of the CBS Evening News (click “expand”):
Her detractors pointed to an overhaul of “CBS Evening News” that sent its ratings plummeting, and her handling of an October incident involving the “CBS Mornings” anchor Tony Dokoupil, who in an interview had challenged the author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ms. McMahon’s critics also believed that the reporting at “60 Minutes” had become politically biased, exposing the company to unnecessary criticism. And it was clear that Mr. Trump was paying close attention.
On May 4, “60 Minutes” aired a segment that quoted some prominent lawyers criticizing the president for acting unlawfully when he issued executive orders targeting law firms.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers perceived those quotes, and the segment as a whole, as an attempt by CBS to gain the upper hand in the settlement negotiations, according to a person with knowledge of the internal discussions. They then countered by conveying a threat to Paramount: Mr. Trump might file a new lawsuit, accusing Paramount and CBS of defaming him in the “60 Minutes” episode, according to two people familiar with knowledge of the talks.
So, when you’re a biased executive who’s donated over $6,000 to the Biden campaign (as per our friend Reagan Reese at the Daily Caller) and a poor performance record, don’t mind us if we don’t feel bad for her.
The Media Research Center’s incoming president David Bozell had this quip as well:
