Catherine Herridge
How X And Joe Rogan Broke The Back of 60 Minutes
| TOP LINE: | |||||||||||||||
| Super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices and embrace transparency. The post election TV ratings abyss is driven both by technology and by the public’s loss of trust in Mainstream media. | |||||||||||||||
| DEEP DIVE: | |||||||||||||||
| To buy MSNBC or not to buy? | |||||||||||||||
| This week’s headline that Comcast will spin off its cable channels underscores the tectonic shift in the media marketplace and how technology is providing the exit ramp for competing platforms. | |||||||||||||||
| When my job as a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News was terminated in February, I took a few months to educate myself about the marketplace because so much had changed since I left Fox in 2019. What I found was genuinely surprising, a little frightening and, oddly, re-assuring for the strength of our democracy. | |||||||||||||||
| You can’t argue with the data. It is compelling. On Election Day, according to @Xdata, the platform boasted record usage of 942 million posts worldwide and 2.2 million hours of watch or listen time over approximately 160k live events. The X data crushed engagement numbers for the mainstream media (MSM.) | |||||||||||||||
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| By example, a Tucker Carlson interview on X has 35 million engagements. The CBS Evening News has 4.5 million viewers. If I had to choose, I’d take 30 million engagements on X because it represents explosive growth. | |||||||||||||||
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| The new super consumers of news are flocking to X and other platforms that support independent journalism, diverse voices, and embrace transparency which can strengthen democracy. This is nothing short of an industrial revolution driven both by technology and by loss of trust in corporate media. | |||||||||||||||
| In 2023, Human Rights lawyer Jacob Mchangama wrote about the upheaval and resulting, “elite panic.” | |||||||||||||||
| “Elite panic is this recurring phenomenon throughout the history of free speech, where whenever the public sphere is expanded, either through new communications technology, or to segments of the population that were previously marginalized, the traditional gatekeepers, the elites who control access to information, tend to fret about the dangers of allowing the unwashed mob — who are too fickle, too unsophisticated, too unlearned — unmediated access to information. They need information to be filtered through the responsible gatekeepers and it may be even more dangerous to allow them to speak without adult supervision. That’s a phenomenon that we see again and again. And we’re seeing it play out now on social media. … [Elite panic is] one contributing factor to the free speech recession.” | |||||||||||||||
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| If you asked me four years ago, if a presidential candidate could skip a 60 Minutes interview, I would have been skeptical. Four years later, candidate Trump bypassed the legacy news magazine and instead, sat down with Joe Rogan. As of this writing, the marathon sit-down viewership reached 51 million views. | |||||||||||||||
| There is no doubt Rogan is a skilled interviewer who can draw out his subjects and deliver huge audiences. Compared to heavily edited network TV reports, the raw, unedited format reveals much about the subject. In politics, the podcast is perfectly suited for the “beer question” which measures a candidate’s authenticity and likability. | |||||||||||||||
| The progressive Harris campaign took a more traditional media approach and came up short. Neither celebrity endorsements which feel less relevant nor a 60 Minutes interview seemed to move the needle. The combined audience of the 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview and its views on YouTube landed at about 10 million, far less than what Rogan and X delivered. | |||||||||||||||
| The legacy of the Kamala Harris 60 Minutes interview is not her responses but the lingering controversy over the CBS’ interview edit. And that is where the public’s loss of trust in the media comes in. I believe this is another driver of the audience exodus. | |||||||||||||||
| CBS aired two different answers from the Vice President to the same question from correspondent Bill Whitaker about the Israeli Prime Minister apparently ignoring the Biden Administration. | |||||||||||||||
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| Since, a credible complaint has been filed at the FCC alleging “news distortion” at the network with a reasonable demand that the full, unedited Kamala Harris transcript be released. CBS News has said “it fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience and not to mislead it.” | |||||||||||||||
| In the October newsletter, I explained that releasing the full, unedited transcript would resolve these questions. There is ample precedent. | |||||||||||||||
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| As a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News, I interviewed President Trump at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I advocated for and CBS News published the full, unedited transcript. | |||||||||||||||
| The CBS News Trump interview was not a special case. The full, unedited transcript from Attorney General Bill Barr’s 2019 interview with CBS chief legal affairs correspondent Jan Crawford was also shared by the network. And more recently, 60 Minutes released the full unedited transcript of its interview with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. | |||||||||||||||
| If the current trend continues, in the 2028 election cycle, the broadcast networks will firmly take a back seat to podcasts, town halls, and investigative journalism on X. For independent journalists and small digital newsrooms, the challenge is developing revenue streams that are viable. | |||||||||||||||
| In February, I was not comforted by the analogy that losing my corporate reporting job was like getting pushed off the Titanic when there were still seats in the lifeboats. In retrospect, I wonder if it may turn out to be more accurate than I initially thought. | |||||||||||||||
| After turning down job offers for which I remain grateful, I began building the Catherine Herridge Reports brand on X and in the newsletter marketplace. These platforms are the new media beachheads. Content is King. | |||||||||||||||
| I’ll have more to say about the future of journalism and why journalism is called a profession for a reason. Look for exclusive new content on media accountability in the coming days! | |||||||||||||||
| Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter and supporting independent investigative journalism! |
How Hunter Biden Laptop Got The CBS News Treatment
In the 60 Minutes interview with then President Trump, correspondent Lesley Stahl said of the Hunter Biden laptop, “It can’t be verified.” As I watched the broadcast, I felt sick.
I knew the laptop records could be vetted and confirmed. I was confused by what seemed a disconnect between the CBS News division and 60 Minutes.
| TOP LINE: | ||
| With new allegations this week about suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the last Presidential election, I can’t help but reflect on my own experience at CBS News — what I believe was a missed opportunity to rebut false claims it was Russian disinformation. | ||
| DEEP DIVE | ||
| This week, our investigative team revealed new evidence on X from IRS whistleblowers about alleged double standards at the IRS and Justice Department in the Hunter Biden probe. | ||
| Case agent Joseph Ziegler told us they were blocked from taking actions that could have revealed the investigation’s existence prior to the 2020 election. | ||
| “There were a lot of overt investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming election,” Ziegler explained “And related to the President’s son. So not even the candidate. And we weren’t allowed to do certain investigative steps.” (IRS,DOJ and others declined to comment) | ||
| The findings from our investigation on X, called “Bucking the Bureaucracy: The Cost of Coming Forward in the Hunter Biden Tax Case,” were amplified by new reporting from the republican-led House Judiciary committee. | ||
| They allege the Hunter Biden laptop reporting was suppressed leading up to the 2020 election to curry political favor, “Facebook executives discussed calibrating censorship decisions to please what they assumed would be an incoming Biden-Harris administration…” | ||
| With these new developments, I can’t help but reflect on my own experience with the Hunter Biden laptop in the fall of 2020 after the New York Post broke the story (and bravely stayed with it.) | ||
| It’s the question I get asked the most. | ||
| “What happened with the Hunter Biden story at CBS before the 2020 election?” | ||
| I believe it’s best that the account comes directly from me. | ||
| On October 23rd, 2020 about 10 days after the story surfaced, I was contacted by senior CBS News executive Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews for “confirmed reporting” on the Hunter Biden story. She said the confirmed reporting was for Evening News Anchor and Managing Editor Norah O’Donnell. | ||
| Days earlier, I had been tasked with vetting the laptop and its contents after multiple platforms had suppressed the story. Due diligence included working the phones, reaching out to people on the Hunter Biden emails for corroboration and cross-referencing court records. The vetted documents I collected also indicated the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden. | ||
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| I told Ciprian-Matthews the vetted materials included a million dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm, emails with Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski as well as Hunter Biden text messages. | ||
| Asked by Ciprian-Matthews if there was a “Hunter connection,” I responded, “Yes, all of them.” | ||
| I then provided some of the vetted records directly to Ciprian-Matthews. We did speak briefly on the phone. I don’t know at this point what happened next. | ||
| QUESTIONS FOR CBS NEWS/SEEKING A RESPONSE | ||
| This weekend, on Saturday, I reached out to CBS News PR with questions for Ciprian-Matthews and Norah O’Donnell. I followed up with a voice mail, and text message to confirm CBS had received our questions as well as the Sunday noon deadline. | ||
| When there was no response, Sunday morning, I forwarded our questions, adding the head of CBS PR and O’Donnell’s agent, writing: | ||
| “We are taking the extra step this morning of reaching out to you for comment and as a courtesy, extending the deadline until 2pm eastern. | ||
| We have copied Ingrid and Norah. If the email addresses are not accurate, we ask that the queries be shared with them so there is full opportunity to respond. | ||
| Thank you in advance for the consideration and confirming receipt of our questions.” | ||
| As of this writing, there has been no response, nor the courtesy of acknowledging receipt of our questions. For transparency, you can read the questions here. | ||
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| Based on my reporting, and as the network’s senior investigative correspondent, the CBS News investigative unit was not tasked in October 2020 to develop more reporting on the laptop. That would have been standard practice. | ||
| In the 60 Minutes interview with then President Trump, correspondent Lesley Stahl said of the Hunter Biden laptop, “It can’t be verified.” As I watched the broadcast, I felt sick. | ||
| I knew the laptop records could be vetted and confirmed. I was confused by what seemed a disconnect between the CBS News division and 60 Minutes. | ||
| OUR FORENSIC REVIEW OF HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP DATA | ||
| It took an additional two years for the network to broadcast a forensic review of the Hunter Biden laptop data. I advocated for the report which determined that both the data belonged to Hunter Biden and it had not been tampered with. Our report was broadcast in November 2022, after the midterm elections. I may have more to say about the delay in the future. | ||
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| By contrast, in October 2020, there seemed little push back to claims from 51 former intelligence officials that the laptop had “classic earmarks” of a Russian information operation. | ||
| According to the published transcript of the edited 60 Minutes interview with then candidate Joe Biden, Norah O’Donnell asked, “Do you believe the recent leak of material allegedly from Hunter’s computer is part of a Russian disinformation campaign?” | ||
| Candidate Biden responded, “… And so when you put the combination of Russia, Giuliani– the president, together– it’s just what it is. It’s a smear campaign because he has nothing he wants to talk about. What is he running on? What is he running on?” | ||
| CBS News executives make the final call on editorial. In October 2020, I believe the preliminary reporting provided to senior CBS News executive Ciprian-Matthews showed the laptop was worth digging into, and more facts should be gathered. I saw it as an opportunity for CBS News to lead on a major story and to rebut disinformation claims. | ||
| I was eventually assigned to the Hunter Biden case. I was encouraged that the most senior corporate executives told me privately they wanted reporting that spoke truth to power on both sides of the aisle. They even provided additional resources, but based on my experience, it seemed their corporate objectives were frustrated by CBS News executives and other employees who were reluctant to take on a story about the President’s son. | ||
| INTEREST WANES | ||
| In 2023, the CBS investigative unit did exclusively interview the same IRS whistleblowers, Shapley and Ziegler. But I found, after the July 2023 plea deal for Hunter Biden fell apart and he faced felony gun and tax charges, that the network’s interest waned. | ||
| As a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News for more than 4 years, our award winning reports were a catalyst for legislative change, impacting a million service members and their families. | ||
| We helped secure 50 Purple Hearts for soldiers who were wrongly denied the award under the Trump administration after an Iranian ballistic missile attack on their base in January 2020. | ||
| We obtained the audio tape of former President Trump seeming to brag and discuss secret documents about Iran at his New Jersey golf club. CNN was first to report the recordings. | ||
| We helped right a decades’ old wrong so that retired Col. Paris Davis, one of the first Black officers in the elite Green Berets, could be recognized with the Medal of Honor for his heroism in Vietnam. | ||
| Two weeks before my position was terminated in February, army whistleblower Nick Nicholls came forward with new evidence that service members were exposed to toxic agents at their overseas base after 9/11. | ||
| Since, with the help of veterans’ advocates, Nicholls’ courage has opened the door to long overdue VA benefits and recognition. | ||
| While I remain proud of these projects, I also believe that prior to the 2020 election, the Hunter Biden laptop was a missed opportunity for CBS News. |
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