Fresh from a week off, CBS’s John Dickerson returns to the airwaves with a particularly pompous fit of cope and seethe over the Paramount-Skydance settlement with President Donald Trump. What’s most notable about his too-cute-by-half is its one glaring omission.
Watch the editorial here in its entirety, as aired on CBS Evening News Plus on Monday, July 14th, 2025:
JOHN DICKERSON: From time to time, American presidents have fantasized about punishing journalists. John Adams went all the way. On this day in 1798, the second president signed the Sedition Act, a law he then used to jail a journalist. The man was James Thompson Callender, the most notorious writer of his day. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton didn't agree on much, but they both hated Callender. His lack of friends explain why an old law book describes Callender as “a scotchman, of whom nothing good is known.” They called him a “scandalmonger". His enemies said he drank too much and was crawling with lice. Callender broke the story of Alexander Hamilton's affair with a married woman, causing the downfall dramatized in the musical Hamilton. Callender targeted members of the Federalist Party, which is why Jefferson, a leader of the rival party, hired him to go after presidential candidate John Adams during the election of 1800. Callender labeled Adams a tyrant in writing that was so personal Adams jailed him, claiming Callender threatened national security, which is the kind of thing tyrants do: fabricating emergencies to justify repression. Jefferson won that election and pardoned Callender. But when you hire an attack dog, you must keep him fed. Jefferson didn't give Callender a job he thought he'd been promised, and Callender then turned his pen on the president. He poured forth against Mr. Jefferson “a torrent of scurrility and slander, of which no example had been previously afforded in the United States, not even by himself”, read one account. Callender wrote that Jefferson had a relationship with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, a claim that would later prove true. Callender's life of mayhem spun out in the James River, where he drowned, reportedly drunk. His death notice was short. No one mourned him. The Sedition Act had a bad end, too, seen as one of the clearest violations in American history of the Constitution's protections of free speech and a free press. One aspect of the story does live on, though the temptation to silence dissent endures in presidents- wherever they fear being questioned.
A week off the air after having to report on the aforementioned settlement did Dickerson absolutely no favors. Tonight’s offering is a throwback to the Sedition Act of 1798, and a muckraker cast as a brave First Amendment warrior. One supposes that Dickerson agrees with Paramount’s characterization of the settlement as “an affront to the First Amendment”, hence this is his first editorial out of the chute.
Another interpretation of the facts suggests that Dickerson went all the way back to Adams and Jefferson’s dealings with James Callender so as to avoid modern, more egregious and ACTUAL attacks on the Free Press and abuses of The First Amendment. How else to explain the mention of Jefferson and Adams, but not President Barack Obama’s actual, more recent, and more egregious abuses of the press?
For starters, there’s the persecution of James Rosen, then of Fox News and now Chief White House Correspondent at Newsmax. James was nice enough to lay it all out in a recent X post, for those who might not recall.
There’s James Risen, formerly of The New York Times, who was put through the ringer because he refused to reveal his sources to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.
Dickerson’s former colleague at CBS, Sharryl Attkisson, reported on The DoJ’s role in Operation Fast & Furious, which angered many in the Obama administration. Her computer was hacked by the Obama Department of Justice.
There was also the wiretapping of The Associated Press- another egregious abuse of the freedom of the press.
Dickerson mentions none of these more recent instances of attacks against the free press in his editorial screed. Doing so would undermine the barely-veiled attack against Trump by exposing Obama as an actual enemy of freedom of the press. That’s (D)ifferent, you see.
