Goodbye Cronkite. Hello Trump.

The new owners of CBS and their handpicked propagandist are all-in on a MAGA makeover — eager to spin, spike, and edit (or not) news content to keep Trump happy.

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social. Subscribe to her Substack, Indistinct Chatter.

Illustration by Riley Levine

Forget Bari Weiss. Ignore David Ellison and his zillionaire father, Larry. Tony Dukoupil? Please. Donald Trump is the one calling the shots at CBS News.

With stunning speed, the storied mainstream news network jettisoned editorial independence, reputation, and hard-earned trust. To make Trump happy, CBS now behaves more like state-TV in Russia, Iran, and North Korea where a government strongman controls the message. Yes, Fox, Newsmax, Twitter and other MAGA media outlets are also proudly spewing Trump propaganda 24/7. But now it’s quickly and intentionally becoming a part of CBS News, too. Recent examples abound:

• Putting a Trump-friendly, unverified story out about ‘internal bleeding’ injuries to the ICE officer who shot Renee Good.

• Agreeing not to edit a Trump interview after being threatened with a lawsuit (and leaving news coverage of that threat to other news outlets)

• Burying the damaging 60 Minutes piece on the Trump administrations use of the CECOT torture prison

• Emphasizing Trump’s false version of January 6th

• Asking softball questions of Trump officials

• Doing an awkward on-air salute to Secretary of State Marco Rubio

It won’t stop there.

The new owners of CBS and their handpicked propagandist are all-in on making CBS into a pro-Trump outlet, eager to spin, spike, and edit (or not) news content.

Trump wanted a team he could trust to do his dirty work, and he couldn’t have found a more compatible bunch to dismantle the nearly 100 year-old-fact based news organization once known for reporting some of the nation’s biggest stories with honesty and depth.

News is not the Ellisons’ business. But they do have a lot of businesses. Businesses that benefit from government favor. I can almost hear the conversation in one of their many mansions. What do you give a President who has everything? And just like that, CBS news ended up in a box with a cute ribbon. Next thing you know, Trump forces the sale of TikTok to the Ellisons and a whole lot more is now on the table.

The Bari Weiss Wrecking Ball

MAGA-coded Bari Weiss is Ellison’s perfect accomplice. Journalist Elizabeth Spiers describes Weiss as a designated courtier, a feckless water carrier for the 1-percent and someone who is “producing a line of propaganda masquerading as news coverage that serves the interest of her patrons—in this case, David Ellison, whose interests are served by protecting Donald Trump.” Add that to Weiss’ news-free resume and a career built on a visceral hatred of mainstream news media (including CBS News) and you can see how burning down the house of Murrow, Cronkite, Couric and Stahl is right up her alley.

It also helps that she has gained serious MAGA cred for her support of Trump. Anyone who fell for the feint that Weiss was “politically homeless” has not been paying attention. Journalist Matt Johnson did an excellent deep dive into Weiss and calls her Free Press blog a “more artful and less shrill version of the anti-woke alarmism that permeates the right-wing media ecosystem.”

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A Portal to MAGA-Coded Junk

The CBS makeover has gone far beyond just slanting the news. It has become a portal pushing viewers to MAGA junk that masquerades as news. Because of Weiss, any news story by a CBS journalist now links to at least two companion pieces by the non-journalists at the Free Press.

It isn’t just individual stories. The CBS News website now has a big section that features Free Press content. And it isn’t just on the web. Cosplay journalists from the conservative opinion site now show up on CBS News programs promoting their very weak and often distorted stories.

RIP CBS News

The last time CBS News had editorial independence was in October 2024 when the most watched news program in the country - 60 Minutes - aired an interview with then-presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump’s meddling with CBS started almost immediately after that and now here we are with new owners bent on destroying the so-called Tiffany Network.

To effect their terrible transformation, the new leadership at CBS News seems to be taking a page from Russell Vought’s playbook — demoralize the remaining staff as quickly as possible and get them to quit. Variety is now reporting that things are so bad that the network is “veering towards dysfunction.”

Colby Hall writes in Mediaite: The CBS staff “are furious and largely trapped. Jobs are scarce. Senior figures are not in a position to simply walk away. They are watching their institution be sacrificed and have little power to stop it.”

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch has written several excellent pieces on the MAGA transformation unfolding at CBS News. He told me: “spiking stories critical of Trump and boosting propaganda that supports him has me greatly concerned” and it “greatly expands the amount of Americans subject to right-wing brainwashing.”

He added:

“I certainly expected some kind of rightward slant from Team Bari but running such a flawed propaganda story about Minneapolis like the “internal bleeding” report has shocked me. So they are deeply compromised, but I know some excellent journalists from before Weiss’ hiring still work there, so CBS stories can’t be ignored yet watched now with a jaundiced eye.”

From Cronkite to Trump

I got my very first TV news reporter job at WCIA-TV, a CBS affiliate in downstate Illinois. I still have the mic flag with the CBS logo on it displayed on a shelf in my home with other TV news memorabilia.

At that time, Walter Cronkite was in his last year of anchoring the CBS Evening News. I remember being proud to work for CBS and to be even very distantly connected to the work Cronkite and his colleagues were doing. Since then I’ve helped with legitimate news outlet turnarounds. What’s happening at CBS News is anything but. This isn’t about building an audience and enhancing the product. Ellison, Weiss and most certainly Trump don’t care about any of that.

Nor do they seem to care if the newscasts are filled with on-air screwups. I’m sure every single one of the experienced CBS staff was as mortified to see Dukoupil fumbling around live on air, lost in a sea of technical problems on the first night of his new show. Never have I seen a news anchor so terribly unprepared to cope with a prompter mix-up. As one of my former colleagues told me, “It’s anchoring 101” to keep a hard copy of your script handy so you can seamlessly switch if and when there’s a teleprompter mishap.

Tuning Out

The audience is not buying what Weiss, the Ellisons, and their overlord, Donald Trump, are selling. The CBS Evening News reboot lost 1-million viewers over the first week. That Bari Weiss/Erika Kirk town hall was not just a ratings loser, advertisers also wanted nothing to do with it. Even the right wing National Review is upset with the changes at CBS. Wow.

The audience is not buying it. But The AUDIENCE is. That would be the one viewer the owners care about, Donald Trump. So long as they steer CBS News away from credible news reporting, embrace false or misleading MAGA content, and lick every boot the administration kicks them with, they are accomplishing their mission of appeasing Mr. Trump.

Trump may not actually be on the morning editorial call, in the afternoon production meetings, out in the field with reporters, or even in the control room during live newscasts with the show producer, director and others but Trump’s still impacting choices big and small about the news product. Who’s ultimately running CBS News? Donald Trump.

And that’s the way it is.