CBS: A week of bad calls, logistics screw-ups and flying furniture
It’s been another jaw dropping week at CBS. To protest the network’s politically motivated cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s top rated late night show, Colbert and David Letterman flung office furniture off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater aiming it squarely at the infamous CBS eyemark logo. While the furniture was flying, problems at the news wing of the company also continued to soar.
Questionable editorial decisions dogged a key interview on 60 Minutes, embarrassing mistakes landed evening news anchor Tony Dokoupil in the wrong country for the Xi-Trump summit and audiences continued to look elsewhere for their news. The CBS Evening News just had its 5th week in a row with under 4M viewers.
CBS isn’t just covering the news. It is in the news, as journalists continue to document its questionable calls, internal flubs, and on-air issues. Chaos and political meddling now define the once great news giant, not journalism. What a colossal shame.
The decline of CBS is also a big joke. “CBS News: when events happen, we’re at most one country away.” That was part of Colbert’s opening monologue on the same night as the furniture-flinging segment with Letterman. Like CBS News, Colbert is a victim of the company’s overall rightward shift and Donald Trump appeasement campaign. With just a handful of shows left, Colbert is punching through to the end.
Colbert’s joke about the news department was, of course, referring to the fact that CBS News failed to get news anchor Tony Dukopil a required visa to cover Donald Trump’s visit to China. Both ABC News and NBC News managed to get their lead anchors to China for live coverage. But CBS’ Dokoupil reported on the event from Taiwan. Yes, CBS News and its lead anchor were broadcasting from a hotel balcony some 1-thousand miles away from the actual summit in Beijing between Trump and Chinese President Xi. How embarrassing.
Getting journalists, producers and the rest of the news crew where news is happening is a vital part of any news operation — local or national. How in the world did CBS screw up these logistics? It’s not like the Trump trip was a surprise. The White House announced the China trip on March 30th. That means CBS had nearly 6-weeks to secure the required documents and make other necessary travel arrangements. This is a really big screw up for the Bari Weiss-led news operation.
But it didn’t stop there. One of Dokoupil’s Taiwan broadcasts was marred by a cameraman falling sick during the live broadcast. Reports say the crew member is okay but questions have been raised about whether the sloppy trip planning forced him to work a 24-hour shift leading up to the broadcast and that might have contributed to the fainting spell. CBS denies that allegation.
Hold on, there’s more. After the visa snafu and fainting cameraman there was even more trouble. The Dokoupil team was apparently kicked out of their Taipei hotel studio because of their overly political coverage of the summit. Oliver Darcy with his latest CBS scoop reports that:
“… the situation—already humiliating enough—managed to get even worse over the last 24 hours, Status has learned. Indeed, eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed that when Dokoupil anchored Thursday’s broadcast, he was in a very different location than the night before. While he anchored his program from a Taipei hotel balcony on Wednesday, Dokoupil was stationed in Liberty Square on Thursday.
The change in location was no small matter and the result of a behind-the-scenes drama. According to people familiar with the matter, the hotel from which Dokoupil had initially been broadcasting was far from pleased with the network using its grounds to anchor the newscast. In the words of one source, after seeing the aggressive way in which Dokoupil presented the geopolitical situation between China and Taiwan on his show, hotel management “was appalled,” not wanting to be a member of regional politics. I’m told that displeasure was made clear to CBS News.”
CBS’ terrible, awful, no good week began with a big controversy over a 60-Minutes interview with Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post reported that editor in chief Bari Weiss let Netanyahu select the journalist who would do the interview. Netanyahu picked CBS reporter Major Garrett over 60 Minutes stalwart Lesley Stahl. The resulting interview was surely not as hard hitting which was probably the point.
Status’ Oliver Darcy adds:
“The feeling inside the program was that Netanyahu had effectively gone around Stahl and the “60 Minutes” team—and that Weiss had assisted him in doing so by finding an interviewer who was, for whatever reason, more agreeable to him. It is worth noting that it is highly unusual for a non-“60 Minutes” correspondent to conduct such high-profile sit-downs for the newsmagazine, let alone two in the span of just a couple months.”
These are big mistakes that top tier news organizations just don’t make. At CBS now, both big and little mistakes are also wrecking the network’s credibility. On Tuesday evening’s newscast, a news story used a stock photo of a receipt in Thai, not English, for a story about high prices in the U.S. It’s a small thing but coming during this overly chaotic week, it’s also emblematic of the non-stop problems engulfing the news network.
We are now 32-weeks into the unlikely reign at CBS News of MAGA-coded Bari Weiss. Many of the longtime CBS journalists still continue to crank out important news stories but that reporting often gets lost in the non-stop chaos, rookie mistakes, and lousy judgement coming from the network’s new ownership & its handpicked management.
The final four Colbert shows are worth looking forward to, though. There probably won’t be anymore flying furniture, but we can probably count on clear eyed, no holds barred criticism of the new CBS. It will be well deserved.
Jennifer Schulze is a former local TV news exec, reporter & producer with a few opinions about the news. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social and Substack at “Indistinct Chatter.”