A dangerous omen at CBS

Trump’s FCC and Skydance aren’t trying to improve the network. They’re trying to control it

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By Brian Montopoli

Travel with me back to a more innocent time: The year is 2005. I am a young journalist at Columbia Journalism Review. The previous year, ahead of the presidential election, CBS News had aired a 60 Minutes II broadcast in which Dan Rather showcased explosive documents that cast President George W. Bush’s national guard service in a negative light.

In a huge black eye for CBS News, those documents turned out to be fake. The ensuing scandal, which became widely known as “Rathergate,” fed conservative attacks against the “liberal media” and likely boosted Bush’s reelection campaign.

In an attempt to save face, CBS News announced the creation of an ombudsman-style blog – CBS News Public Eye – that would bring “unprecedented” transparency to the news operation. It marked “an opportunity for our audience to hold CBS News more publicly accountable,” wrote cofounder Dick Meyer. The network brought in three independent journalists – including me – to run the site.

I spent three years at Public Eye before moving over to become a CBS News political reporter after the site was shuttered in 2008. It was challenging work: My role involved being critical of the network that was paying my salary. But we asked hard questions, shined a light on editorial operations, and generally fulfilled our mandate. What I found was a network full of diligent journalists who bent over backward to be fair to all sides.

I mention this history because CBS News may be getting back into the ombudsman business: