Norah O'Donnell
CBS This Morning on Wednesday mocked Mike Pence's silence during a White House meeting with Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Co-host Norah O’Donnell derided the Vice President as looking like an “Elf on the Shelf sitting there.”
CBS This Morning ran a strange segment Monday morning about office party etiquette this holiday season with New York Times contributing writer Jennifer Weiner -- who awkwardly dragged Justice Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford into it. As the left tends to do, Weiner made the concept of a Christmas party political, worrying that it just another way women would be sexually harassed for what they wear.
All three networks on Friday allowed just seconds to the new U.S., Mexico and Canadian trade deal lobbied for by Donald Trump. CBS This Morning deemed it a “win” for the President, but only allowed 30 seconds of total time to the deal. NBC’s Today barely did better, managing 34 seconds. ABC’s Good Morning America offered the most, a still-not-impressive 44 seconds.
Despite a combined two and a half hours of available air time, CBS on Wednesday night and Thursday morning allowed just 94 seconds to the latest shocking sexual assault allegations against the network’s former chairman and CEO, Les Moonves. The New York Times on Wednesday offered new details on Moonves’s attempts to cover up forced oral sex against an actress.
CBS This Morning co-hosts scored an exclusive interview with the newly chosen House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy. But the network journalists chose to spend the entire interview demanding he answer for a lack of diversity within the Republican Party.
As CBS informed viewers of a number of ballot initiatives that were passed in various states on Tuesday, both the CBS Evening News and the CBS This Morning on Wednesday only showed interest in cases in which liberals were victorious. By contrast, FNC's Special Report with Bret Baier and Fox and Friends gave attention to a mixture of both conservative and liberal victories.
All three networks worried about the “fate” of the Mueller investigation with news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was fired yesterday. On Thursday’s morning news programs, anchors and reporters tore into his replacement as acting AG, Matthew Whitaker, for comments he has made in the past criticizing the Mueller investigation. They also touted Democrats like Chuck Schumer fearmongering, calling it a “constitutional crisis.”
Within moments of the broadcast networks coming on the air Tuesday night with their midterm coverage, ABC, CBS, and NBC had the long knives out for Republicans, condemning their “nativist,” “white-hot rhetoric” creating “one of the most divisive midterms in our lifetime” that was marred by “hate, violence and tragedy.”
CBS This Morning on Tuesday continued the effort to link Donald Trump to the appalling murder of Jews worshiping at a synagogue on Saturday. Co-host Norah O’Donnell talked to Jim VandeHei of Axios and demanded to know if he grilled the President in an interview: “I wondered if you got any sort of opportunity to challenge the President on some of the rhetoric that he's used, specifically using the word ‘invader,’ which is also a word that the Pittsburgh shooter used.”
CBS This Morning journalists on Monday chided Donald Trump for his “tone” in reaction to Saturday’s mass murder of Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Despite the President condemning the acts as evil and ordering flags at half staff, co-host Norah O’Donnell and reporter Weijia Jiang repeatedly brought up Trump’s outside activities. This is in stark contrast tothe network spinning for Barack Obama after a vacation in the wake of the beheading of American James Foley.
The co-hosts of CBS This Morning on Tuesday plotted strategy for the Democrats in the 2018 midterms, talking to the liberal co-hosts of the podcast Pod Save America, Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer. Together, they wanted to know just what Democrats could do to take the House and the Senate. This Morning co-host John Dickerson asked, “To the extent that Democrats can have a message, what should it be in the last two months?”
In a series of truly mind-boggling reports on Monday, all three network morning shows bizarrely accused the Trump administration of considering “changing the definition of gender” by simply reversing Obama-era regulations that actually did change the definition of gender by abandoning the scientific and biological meaning of the term.