WHEN LEGACY MEDIA GASLIGHTS ITS OWN AUDIENCE

[noumoe]

From Catherine Herridge on X:

“WHEN LEGACY MEDIA GASLIGHTS ITS OWN AUDIENCE

This week, the Hunter Biden IRS whistleblowers were vindicated. They were promoted to leadership positions at IRS headquarters by the Treasury Secretar where they will advise on badly needed cultural reform.

Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler were so severely retaliated against by previous IRS leadership that independent government investigators found in their favor.  As they told me in October for our investigation “Bucking the Bureaucracy,” they believe the retaliation was designed to bankrupt them, and to drive them to suicide.

This week’s headline from CBS News, “Once Sidelined IRS Agents Who Investigated Hunter Biden Promoted By Trump Administration” caught my attention.  I knew firsthand how CBS News executives worked overtime to bury both the IRS whistleblowers and the government records they brought forward after Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal collapsed in the summer of 2023. 

While CBS News initially led on the IRS whistleblower story (our team secured the first interviews with Shapley and Ziegler) once Hunter Biden faced felony gun and tax charges, the network scaled back coverage. I found the CBS headline stunning and disingenuous because CBS News was part of the sidelining! 

As the senior investigative correspondent and lead reporter on the Hunter Biden story, an assignment I did not volunteer for, I had broken major headlines for the network.  I was not surprised to see this week’s CBS News update sanitized and my investigative contributions to the network erased.

In my role, I witnessed how executives in the CBS News standards and legal departments, the network’s editorial gatekeepers, demanded language in my reporting that appeared to undercut Gary Shapley, Joseph Ziegler and insulated the Biden family.  Every CBS report had some kind of disclaimer such as, “During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden consistently maintained that he was not involved in any of his son's business dealings and the White House has continued to deny any connection exists.”  

After Hunter Biden’s plea deal for tax and gun charges fell apart, the CBS Network coverage took gaslighting to a new level.  With a growing body of evidence, including internal IRS records provided to Congress that showed how the Biden IRS and Justice Department blocked the probe, CBS News executives insisted on editorial that seemed to shield the Biden family.
 
A straightforward video for social media about a search warrant in the Hunter Biden case took days to get cleared by the legal and standards departments because “Political Figure 1” was Joe Biden.  By contrast, when I obtained audio tapes of then former President Trump bragging about sensitive Iran documents, CBS News aired my reporting within hours. 

When you get beyond the revisionist headline, the CBS News story omits key information and glosses over the extraordinary pardons granted to the Biden family as Joe Biden left office. One of the reasons legacy media has a trust deficit with the public is that it rewrites its past coverage of controversial issues.   It is never a good look when a legacy newsroom has a difficult relationship with the facts. 

Beyond the implications for journalism, gaslighting your audience is a TV ratings killer.  Our exclusive interview on X with the IRS whistleblowers after Hunter Biden pleaded guilty in September to felony tax charges, had more than 14 million engagements.  

According to Nielsen ratings from Adweek, the combined ratings of the CBS Evening News (4 million) and CBS Mornings (1.8 million) are less than half of our engagement numbers.

While the promotion of Shapley and Ziegler at the IRS is encouraging, our team will not let up. 

GOP Senator Chuck Grassley, an early champion of the IRS whistleblowers, said “..if we reinstate whistleblowers who have been retaliated against, it will send a clear signal that pointing out wrongdoing is an honorable thing to do…”