On Monday, CBS News was forced to issue an embarrassing &#8220;clarification&#8221; after the network ran with an apparently unverified video concerning a crying nurse from Chicago.
&#8220;In tears, a nurse says she quit her job after she was asked to work in a coronavirus ICU without a face mask: &#8216;America is not prepared, and nurses are not being protected,'&#8221; CBS captioned a video of the nurse in question, later identified as <a href="https://www.instagram.com/nurse.iv/">nurse and lifestyle blogger</a> Imaris Vera.
&#8220;I quit my job today,&#8221; Vera says in the viral video, tears streaming down her face. &#8220;I wanted to work, and I was assigned to a COVID patient on an ICU unit that has been converted to a designated COVID unit.&#8221;
&#8220;None of the nurses are wearing masks,&#8221; she claimed, &#8220;not even surgical masks in the hallways when they’re giving report to each other.&#8221;
&#8220;I had my own N95 mask,&#8221; the woman continued. &#8220;I told my manager, I understand we’re short on supplies, but let me protect myself, let me feel safe. I have family that I have to come home to, and the way things are looking, this isn’t gonna get any better.&#8221;
&#8220;America is not prepared and nurses are not being protected,&#8221; Vera closed the video, which, as of Monday, has racked up over 7.2 million views.
CBS, which apparently picked up the video from the blogger&#8217;s heavily trafficked Instagram page, added sad music and a video caption: &#8220;This nurse had to make a difficult decision in order to protect herself and family members with pre-existing conditions.&#8221;
Upon watching the gut-wrenching video and reading the outlet&#8217;s captions, one could only assume Vera and fellow nurses were not given any masks.
But this was apparently not the case.
CBS News posted a follow-up &#8220;clarification&#8221; on Monday: &#8220;Imaris Vera, the nurse in this video, clarified her experience on Monday in a tweet: &#8216;We were each assigned 1 N95 per 1 covid patient’s room but was not allowed to wear it outside of the room, wear our own N95 mask around the Nurses station or Halls, which I came prepared with.'&#8221;
&#8220;The hospital, Northwestern Medicine, acknowledged that Imaris Vera had quit her job, but referred CBS News to Vera as to the details of why,&#8221; the news outlet added.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
The hospital, Northwestern Medicine, acknowledged that Imaris Vera had quit her job, but referred CBS News to Vera as to the details of why.
&mdash; CBS News (@CBSNews) <a href="https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1247291281195360257?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 6, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Vera had apparently not worked at the hospital for over a year before going in and quitting, according to messages she has posted online.
&#8220;Prior to CBS picking up this video, Imaris posted on her public Facebook page that she has anxiety and bi-polar depression and had not been an employee at the hospital for over a year. She mentioned in her post that she was unsure if she was ready to return to her job,&#8221; <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/06/cbs-news-posts-fraudulent-video-icu-nurse-crying-over-poor-working-conditions/#.Xoto3z8aCK4.twitter">The Federalist</a> reported Monday. &#8220;Imaris also said the growing volume of information on coronavirus &#8216;triggers&#8217; her.&#8221;
In one message allegedly posted by Vera, she wrote: “The information overload can be hard for me to sift through as far as what is credible and what is not, it triggers me.&#8221;
&#8220;Nurses and medical workers are working tirelessly with inadequate protection gear, and they are the real heroes,&#8221; The Federalist noted. &#8220;For an Instagram &#8216;influencer&#8217; to deliberately misrepresent her career for the instant glorification of internet fame is sickening.&#8221;
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
In tears, a nurse says she quit her job after she was asked to work in a coronavirus ICU without a face mask: “America is not prepared, and nurses are not being protected” <a href="https://t.co/ywoSuLOPYP">https://t.co/ywoSuLOPYP</a> <a href="https://t.co/S5BsnlO5nt">pic.twitter.com/S5BsnlO5nt</a>
&mdash; CBS News (@CBSNews) <a href="https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1246804028601896961?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 5, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&nbsp;

Surgical Mask/ Flu Mask On Blue Background

WATCH: CBS Forced To Walk Back Viral Video Of Crying Nurse

Coronavirus

CBS News was forced to admit that it made an &#8220;editing mistake&#8221; after social media users noted that it used horrifying footage of an overcrowded Italian hospital in a report about New York City.
The footage, filmed in Bergamo, Italy, near the epicenter of that country&#8217;s coronavirus outbreak, shows a ward crowded with coronavirus patients, stacked together and coughing as doctors, wearing personal protective equipment, dash between them, clearly overwhelmed. As the camera pans around, the footage shows more patients lined up head to foot in hallways and in every corner of the hospital.
Sky News first aired the report on the Bergamo hospital on March 22nd and CBS, apparently lacking in similarly terrifying footage from New York City&#8217;s own medical facilities, repurposed it on March 25th.
“That is because more than half of the nation’s new coronavirus cases are being found right here,” a voice says over the footage in the CBS report. “Crowded subway cars may have accelerated the spread. New York’s governor says FEMA gave the state 400 ventilators.&#8221;
The report then cuts to scenes of the New York City subway.
Twitter user @Alx spotted the film and used a side-by-side comparison to show how CBS placed the footage into a report about New York City, likely leaving viewers with the impression that many of the city&#8217;s hospitals are so overwhelmed, patients are being left to suffer in hospital hallways.
&#8220;During a Pandemic it is essential that the Media gives us real and accurate information,&#8221; @Alx noted. &#8220;It’s completely irresponsible for <a class="PrettyLink profile customisable h-card" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/CBSNews" data-mentioned-user-id="15012486" data-scribe="element:mention">@CBSNews</a> to use footage from an Italian Hospital when talking about the outbreak in New York City. This is unacceptable.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
During a Pandemic it is essential that the Media gives us real and accurate information.
It’s completely irresponsible for <a href="https://twitter.com/CBSNews?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CBSNews</a> to use footage from an Italian Hospital when talking about the outbreak in New York City.
This is unacceptable. <a href="https://t.co/Essp4uEHle">pic.twitter.com/Essp4uEHle</a>
&mdash; ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) <a href="https://twitter.com/alx/status/1244647836031074304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 30, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
CBS, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/cbs-news-admits-mistake-after-airing-footage-of-overcrowded-nyc-hospital-that-was-actually-in-italy">Fox News reports</a>, finally admitted that it had made a &#8220;mistake&#8221; late Monday, blaming the report on an editing error.
&#8220;It was an editing mistake. We took immediate steps to remove it from all platforms and shows,&#8221; a CBS spokesperson told Fox.
&#8220;We took immediate steps to remove it from all platforms and shows,&#8221; the network added when speaking to the <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cbs-news-blames-editing-mistake-after-footage-from-italian-hospital-appears-in-report-on-new-york-coronavirus-crisis">Washington Examiner</a>.
Some social media users remained unconvinced by CBS&#8217;s excuse, noting that the CBS footage seems to remove bits of the film that show signs written in Italian &#8212; a sign that CBS may have reviewed the clip before shoehorning it into a story about New York City.
New York City is the epicenter of the virus in the United States, with more than 900 deaths and, as of Tuesday morning, more than 75,000 individual cases of coronavirus. Hospitals are, reportedly, overwhelmed, according to <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/health/nyc-hospitals-overwhelmed-by-coronavirus-patients-resident-warns">Fox News</a>, which notes that hospitals in Queens and Brooklyn, two boroughs of New York City, seems to be suffering the most from the city&#8217;s outbreak.
Healthcare workers are also being affected by the virus. &#8220;Hospital operator Northwell Health said 155 of its 72,000 employees have tested positive for coronavirus,&#8221; per Fox News. &#8220;The New York State Nurses Association said at least 67 nurses had been infected. The union for the city’s EMS workers said more than 50 had tested positive and more than 400 are showing symptoms.&#8221;
On Monday, a Navy hospital ship docked near New York City to provide additional medical support and the United States Army Corps of Engineers is setting up several field hospitals to handle overflow, particularly of coronavirus patients who do not need intensive care facilities.

CBS News Says It Made A ‘Mistake‘ Airing Terrifying Footage Of Italian Hospital During Report About NYC

After 25 seasons, &#8220;Judge Judy&#8221; is officially coming to an end, but host Judy Sheindlin — television&#8217;s top-paid personality — already has something new in the works.
The popular courtroom reality TV show host made the big announcement in an appearance on &#8220;The Ellen DeGeneres Show&#8221; on Monday and, like the seasoned professional that she is, teased the next big thing.
&#8220;I&#8217;ve had a 25-year-long marriage with CBS [Television Distribution, which distributes the show], and it&#8217;s been successful,&#8221; Sheindlin told DeGeneres, in comments reported by <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/judge-judy-ending-25-seasons-new-show-judy-justice-works-1282015">The Hollywood Reporter</a>.
CBS, Sheindlin explained, felt that it was time to end the show after more than two decades and to instead focus on &#8220;optimally utililiz[ing]&#8221; the reruns.
&#8220;Next year will be our 25th season, silver anniversary, and CBS sort of felt, I think, they wanted to optimally utilize the repeats of my program,&#8221; said Sheindlin. &#8220;Because now they have 25 years of reruns. So what they decided to do was to sell a couple of years&#8217; worth of reruns.&#8221;
As for herself, Judge Judy said she&#8217;s &#8220;not tired,&#8221; and, in fact, she&#8217;s already working on a new show &#8220;Judy Justice,&#8221; that will come out a year after this final season of her sunsetting show.
But on which network that show will air Sheindlin wouldn&#8217;t say. Asked about it by DeGeneres, Sheindlin said, &#8220;I can&#8217;t tell you yet.&#8221;
In its report on the announcement, THR notes that Sheindlin is &#8220;the highest-paid personality on TV, earning $47 million a year,&#8221; since signing her current deal back in 2015. In 2017, she worked out another blockbuster deal, where CBS bought the complete library of her show for nearly $100 million.
Sheindlin has been in the news as of late for more than just her beloved long-running show after weighing in on the 2020 presidential election, officially endorsing a candidate for the first time in her career back in October. The famous TV personality announced her endorsement of Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg in an op-ed for <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/10/16/judge-judy-michael-bloomberg-presidential-race-2020-column/3984012002/">USA Today</a> in late-October.
“I was invited to speak at the Cambridge Union in England earlier this month, and it was an honor to meet with so many intelligent, socially involved people,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;During the Q&amp;A that followed my remarks, the moderator asked my opinion about the 2020 presidential election, and I didn’t mince words. I said our American family has been fractured in recent years. We’re hopelessly divided, and a bitterly divided family cannot thrive.&#8221;
&#8220;The only way we can begin to come together again, I said, is if Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, becomes our next president,&#8221; she continued. &#8220;I realize I am taking a personal and a career risk in making such a statement. I have carefully stayed away from politics for 50 years, except to vote. But times have changed in our country, and I believe the moment has come for me to step out from behind the curtain. I want to speak honestly and from the heart — regardless of the consequences.&#8221;
Since penning the op-ed, she has continued to push for a Bloomberg presidency, including during an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-judge-judy-endorses-mike-bloomberg-2020-on-the-view-greatest-president">appearance</a> on &#8220;The View&#8221; in January.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-judge-judy-endorses-mike-bloomberg-2020-on-the-view-greatest-president">WATCH: Judge Judy Endorses Mike Bloomberg 2020 On &#8216;The View&#8217;: &#8216;Greatest President&#8217;</a>

Judge Judy Sheinlin

‘Judge Judy’ Canceled After 25 Seasons; Sheindlin Announces New Show, Teases Which Network It’ll Be On

Judge Judy Sheindlin

Michael Bloomberg

Emmy Award-winning journalist Lara Logan has secured a deal with Fox News&#8217; streaming service Fox Nation, a report from <a href="https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/lara-logan-fox-nation-documentary-fox-news-1203407885/">Variety</a> published Monday revealed.
Logan, the former chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News and a correspondent for “60 Minutes,&#8221; will be hosting a four-part docuseries called &#8220;No Agenda&#8221; for the streaming service, which is set to debut  in January of 2020.
The docuseries &#8220;will feature four 90-minute installments, each comprised of four episodes that will be released simultaneously on the platform,&#8221; Variety reported. &#8220;Logan will focus on four topics: media bias, immigration, socialism and veterans. She is expected to report from &#8216;the front lines of America’s political and ideological war zones and dive into a number of hot-button issues with on-the-ground coverage and expert interviews,&#8217; according to a description.&#8221;
“This series is what American people tell me they want everywhere I go &#8212; honest, independent journalism that will not bow to propagandists and political operatives who use the media as a weapon to silence, punish and bully,” Logan said in a statement.
In February, Logan made headlines for calling out the mainstream media for dropping even the pretense of being objective, likening some journalists to “activists” and “propogandists.”
“The media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just in the U.S. But in this country, 85% of journalists are registered Democrats – that’s just a fact,&#8221; Logan <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/propagandists-emmy-award-winning-journalist-lara-amanda-prestigiacomo">told</a> “<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mike-drop/id1346234726?mt=2#episodeGuid=c5cadfbd9cd84d269f96d77cc647ef89">Mike Drop</a>&#8221; podcast host Mike Ritland, a retired Navy SEAL
“How do you know you’re being lied to?&#8221; Logan continued blasting the mainstream media. &#8220;How do you know you’re being manipulated? How do you know there’s something not right with the coverage? When they simplify it all and there’s no gray. There’s no gray. It’s all one way. Well, life isn’t like that. If it doesn’t match real life, it’s probably not — there’s something wrong.”
Regarding President Donald Trump, Logan noted that nearly all coverage on POTUS is negative. &#8220;That’s distortion of the way things go in real life, because although the media has historically always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today,&#8221; she said.
“We’ve become political activists, and some could argue propagandists, and there’s some merit to that,” Logan bluntly added.
During the interview, the journalist also commented on Fox News being one of the only news sources on the Right.
&#8220;This is the problem that I have: There’s one Fox,&#8221; she said. &#8220;There’s one Fox and there’s many, many, many more organizations on the Left. … The problem is the weight of all these organizations on one side of the political spectrum. When you turn on your computer, or you walk past the TV, or you see a newspaper headline in the grocery store, if they’re all saying the same thing, the weight of that convinces you that it’s true. You don’t question it, because everyone is saying it. And unless you seek out Breitbart on your computer, you’re probably not even going to know what the other side is saying.&#8221;
Concluding the fiery podcast, Logan told Ritland: &#8220;This interview is professional suicide for me.&#8221;
The journalist has won Emmy Awards for her work in the field, as previously noted by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/propagandists-emmy-award-winning-journalist-lara-amanda-prestigiacomo">The Daily Wire</a>. Logan was sexually assaulted by scores of men in a near-death attack while reporting in Egypt’s Tahrir Square on February 11, 2011. Logan <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO12X1nhzzk&amp;app=desktop">broke her silence</a> on the traumatic event on “60 Minutes” in April of that year, recalling the horrifying details. Logan went back to reporting soon after recuperating from the dramatic assault.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/propagandists-emmy-award-winning-journalist-lara-amanda-prestigiacomo">WATCH: CBS’ Lara Logan Calls Out Media For Propaganda-Like Coverage: ‘This Interview Is Professional Suicide For Me’</a>

Laura Logan

After Calling Out Media, Former ‘60 Minutes’ Host Lara Logan Lands Deal With Fox News

Fox News

Lara Logan

Media Bias

On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the media’s attempt to romanticize the next phase of impeachment proceedings in order to manipulate the public’s emotions. Video and partial transcript below: 
They’ve scheduled open impeachment hearings for next week — theoretically open impeachment hearings, and let&#8217;s just listen to the way CBS News, Norah O&#8217;Donnell, who is really bad. She is, she&#8217;s not just bad, she&#8217;s stiff and performative on the news. She&#8217;s so prejudiced, so biased that anyone with any sense of fairness has got to listen to her and think, &#8220;Wait a minute, this isn&#8217;t the news. These are Democrat talking points.&#8221; But you got to listen to this, the way she promotes the upcoming impeachment hearings.  
<blockquote>O’DONNELL: Tonight: Lights, camera, testimony. The stage is set for the first televised hearings of the impeachment inquiry. We now know when they will happen and who may be the Democrats&#8217; star witness. 
Good evening and thank you for joining us. It&#8217;s official: Historic, televised impeachment hearings begin a week from today, and it promises to be must-see TV. The Democrats plan to start with their star witness, a West Point grad with 50 years of public service. Acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor will testify Wednesday alongside Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent. Then on Friday, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch will testify. House Democrats say that&#8217;s just the beginning. 
Today, more Democrats — I should say, more of the Democrats released more transcripts from those closed door depositions, and Nancy Cordes says they offer a preview of what&#8217;s expected to be bombshell testimony.</blockquote>
Bombshell? It’s a bombshell! Lights, camera, action! I mean, it’s like over at NewsBusters, they said it&#8217;s like a prize fight, but it&#8217;s just like promotion for entertainment, promotion for a movie. It&#8217;s a blockbuster &#8230;
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3t2OFnH_VEY?start=411" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
Anyway, so they&#8217;re promoting this thing like it&#8217;s a movie, and here&#8217;s a piece that The Washington Post ran on Adam Schiff, the congressman in my district. Now this guy to me is like a greasy McCarthyite dishonest guy. He&#8217;s been caught lying repeatedly. Right, he lied about the whistleblower, he lied about having evidence of Russian collusion with Trump, he has just lied from the beginning, plus he looks like a turtle taken out of his shell. I&#8217;m sorry, but he does, he looks like a turtle. [The] guy is a turtle taken out of its shell and he lies all the time, and the Left, both The New York Times, a former newspaper, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/adam-schiff-once-wanted-to-be-a-screenwriter-can-he-give-the-trump-presidency-a-hollywood-ending/2019/10/31/07cb9594-f748-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html">The Washington Post</a>, where democracy dies in crap, are trying to glorify this guy to make him look like a romantic figure. It is utterly amazing. I mean, people do have eyes. They do have ears, they do see things, but they&#8217;re living in their own world. So here&#8217;s the [headline]:
&#8220;Adam Schiff once wanted to be a screenwriter. Can he give the Trump presidency a Hollywood ending?&#8221; 
And we know what The Washington Post — this is in the style section, by the way. We know what The Washington Post thinks a Hollywood ending to the Trump presidency would be: It’s Trump led out of the White House in handcuffs. Ain&#8217;t going to happen, but let me read you some of this, because it actually does tell you exactly what&#8217;s happening when you think about it. 
<blockquote>When Adam Schiff was a young assistant U.S. attorney living in Los Angeles, he did what everyone does when they moved to Hollywood. He wrote a screenplay. He spent hours at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sciences, reading the scripts for &#8220;Silence of the Lambs&#8221; and &#8220;Witness&#8221; in the library (it was the ‘90s). He leaned on his courtroom experience, thinking back on snippets of dialog during trials as he typed out a crime thriller. The prosecutor was the hero, naturally. He called it &#8220;Minotaur,&#8221; and, if you ask Schiff, it was pretty good.
&#8220;I got an offer of an option from Nick Wechsler,&#8221; Schiff said, leaning back in a leather chair inside his Capitol Hill office late last month. &#8220;He produced &#8216;The Player,’ remember that movie with Tim Robbins?&#8221;
Schiff turned down the offer, he said. He doesn&#8217;t remember it being a huge sum of money, and anyway, he was getting into a different kind of storytelling business: Politics.</blockquote>
This is The Washington Post glorifying this guy and yet also playing his hand.
<blockquote>In some ways, he&#8217;s become the chief storyteller of this drama-filled political moment. Schiff is the head of the House Intelligence Committee and leader of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry of President Trump. He&#8217;s in charge of calling witnesses, taking depositions, and subpoenaing documents. More than that, it&#8217;s his job to stitch it all together into a believable, easy-to-follow narrative. Imagine the pitch meeting: It&#8217;s like &#8220;The Manchurian Candidate,&#8221; except the president has heel spurs. It&#8217;s &#8220;The Godfather&#8221; meets &#8220;Borat.&#8221;</blockquote>
Alright, they’re telling you — you know, I talk about this on college campuses a lot because really, my expertise, is storytelling. That is what I&#8217;ve done all my life, that&#8217;s what I know about. I&#8217;ve studied it a lot, I’ve studied it deeply. I would say, I know about narrative and how it works, and I know about how it affects people and about how storyteller stories manipulate your emotions. 
Again, I think I mentioned this yesterday, you go to a movie and you cry over the death of someone who never lived, right? And that&#8217;s an important thing — it tells you that your emotions can be manipulated at a very high level, and it&#8217;s a good thing. We like it when it&#8217;s done right. But it can also be used against you, because they can manipulate emotions that are geared to one thing and tell you that they&#8217;re about another. 
The best example I can think about is a movie like &#8220;Avatar,&#8221; which is also the movie &#8220;Dances with Wolves,&#8221; which is also the movie &#8220;Pocahontas.&#8221; They&#8217;re all the same movie: A man from a civilized, in these cases white, society enters the world of a less civilized, non-white society and discovers that they&#8217;re the innocents and they&#8217;re these wonderful — what do they call them in the old days, the noble savage? — and his society is deeply corrupt. That&#8217;s the story in each one of those instances, right? His civilized society is bad, and the innocent brown people with their primitive society is good. 
Listen, all stories that move you are telling the truth, but it&#8217;s up to you to find out what that truth is. The truth is, we all know that there&#8217;s something distorting about technology, there&#8217;s something distorting about civilization. Freud called it &#8220;Civilization and Its Discontents,&#8221; and we all have this Rousseauvian feeling that there&#8217;s something we left behind, just like we have a feeling that there&#8217;s something we left behind in childhood. Maybe those feelings are connected? 
Okay, so they&#8217;re manipulating that to tell you that the white cavalry men in the West were bad and the Native Americans were good. They’re manipulating a true feeling to tell you something that is historically a lot more complicated than that, right? Historically, it&#8217;s a lot more complicated, and &#8220;Avatar&#8221; is even worse because they&#8217;re manipulating you to think that the American military is bad. Basically, they were telling you that the Iraqis and the Afghanis were innocent people and we were going in there to steal their oil. &#8230;
Anyway, this is what they&#8217;re doing: Manipulating us. They&#8217;re playing this up, [saying] it&#8217;s a dramatic moment in politics. It&#8217;s not dramatic, it&#8217;s really not. We know what the story is, we know the real story. We know that this is something that&#8217;s been going on for a long time — that they&#8217;re trying to get this president impeached.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. 
</a><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-andrew-klavan-show">Watch “The Andrew Klavan Show” on-demand!</a>

Nancy Pelosi And Adam Schiff

KLAVAN: Lights, Camera, Impeachment!

Democratic Party

Impeachment

Washington Post

Remember this the next time you hear someone in the media fret about &#8220;protecting whistleblowers.&#8221; After footage leaked of an ABC reporter complaining about higher-ups killing her Jeffrey Epstein story and preventing her from reporting on it for three years, ABC set out to find the person responsible for the leak. Reportedly, they did find the culprit. The person now works at CBS. According to journalist Yashar Ali, that person <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-report-alleges-abc-news-determined-the-identity-of-ex-staffer-who-leaked-damning-epstein-footage-of-their-anchor-so-cbs-news-fired-the-staffer">has now been fired</a>. Page Six adds that <a href="https://pagesix.com/2019/11/07/cbs-news-fires-staffer-who-had-access-to-leaked-amy-robach-audio/?dg">the staffer is a female</a>.
To review: A woman at ABC discovered that the network was protecting a serial rapist and sex trafficker. She blew the whistle on the scandal and left the company. ABC then tracked the woman down and enlisted CBS to fire her on its behalf. Both of these networks, who colluded to punish a whistleblower, have spent the last many months and years breathlessly extolling the virtues of whistleblowing and the evils of collusion.
<iframe title="Media Wages War Against Whistleblower | The Matt Walsh Show Ep. 366" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dc_gnVXS8vQ?start=137&#038;feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Remember what Amy Robach said in the leaked footage:
<blockquote>I’ve had the story for three years. I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts. We would not put it on the air. First of all, I was told, &#8220;who’s Jeffrey Epstein, no one knows who that is, this is a stupid story.&#8221; Then the Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways. We were so afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will — that also quashed the story. And then Alan Dershowitz was also implicated in it because of the planes. She told me everything. She had pictures, she had everything. She was in hiding for 12 years. We convinced her to come out. We convinced her to talk to us. It was unbelievable what we had — Clinton, we had everything.</blockquote>
This is a firsthand witness and victim who could present documentation to support her allegations against some of the most powerful people on Earth. ABC&#8217;s squashing of these revelations is, without question, one of the most significant media scandals in modern times. That&#8217;s what makes it all the more stunning and disgraceful that a rival network would help them punish the woman who blew the lid on it all.
Indeed, most of the mainstream media has given an assist to ABC either by mostly ignoring the scandal or by openly defending ABC. CNN&#8217;s &#8220;media correspondent,&#8221; Brian Stelter, when faced with the biggest media story of the decade, was seemingly reluctant to say anything about it at all. When he <a href="https://www.redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2019/11/06/brian-stelters-hot-take-abcepstein-story-everything-wrong-journalism-media-firefighters-today/">finally did acknowledge</a> the bombshell, he accepted ABC&#8217;s excuse at face value and turned the story into another opportunity to scold &#8220;right-wing commentators&#8221; for &#8220;stoking hatred of the media.&#8221; As for NBC, its reluctance to cover the scandal is par for the course. After all, these are the people who <a href="https://www.insider.com/nbc-execs-tried-to-shut-down-harvey-weinstein-story-2019-11">ran interference for Harvey Weinstein</a> for years.
No doubt, the media will continue acting persecuted when President Trump attacks them and labels them &#8220;enemies of the people.&#8221; But there&#8217;s a reason those attacks play so well. And they deserve all of the vitriol and contempt heaped upon them.

Jeffrey Epstein

WALSH: ABC And CBS Just Colluded To Fire A Whistleblower. The Hypocrisy Is Breathtaking.

ABC News

Project Veritas

CBS announced on Monday that the hit action television show &#8220;Walker, Texas Ranger&#8221; will get a modern reboot and complete overhaul.
According to <a href="https://deadline.com/2019/09/walker-texas-ranger-reboot-jared-padalecki-in-the-works-chuck-norris-1202741160/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Deadline</a>, &#8220;Supernatural&#8221; star and Texas native Jared Padalecki is set to both produce the show and take over the role of Cordell Walker from original star, acting legend Chuck Norris, who wore the Texas Ranger badge for nine seasons and starred in a television film after the show ended. 
Anna Fricke, best known for executive producing the military drama &#8220;Valor,&#8221; will write and executive produce the remake along with Dan Lin (&#8220;Lethal Weapon&#8221; and &#8220;Godzilla: King of the Monsters&#8221;) and Dan Spilo (&#8220;Sunnyside&#8221;).
&#8220;Walker, Texas Ranger&#8221; was known for exploring themes of morality, family, justice, and faith. Deadline is reporting that those themes will all be facets of the new series with a focus on &#8220;rediscovering our lost common ground.&#8221;
Moving the action from its original city of Dallas to Austin, The Hollywood Reporter <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/jared-padalecki-star-walker-texas-ranger-reboot-1242551" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">notes</a> the plot will revolve around widower Cordell Walker returning home after some time undercover. He will receive a female partner and begin patrolling the streets of Texas&#8217; capital city and possibly beyond. No word yet on who will play his partner or if other familiar characters will appear on the show.
CBS Studios has not decided on which network the series will land. Some have speculated that the series will join their flagship network beside other remakes such as &#8220;Hawaii Five-0&#8221; and &#8220;MacGyver.&#8221; However, it is also possible that &#8220;Walker&#8221; could land at the CW, where Padalecki has spent fifteen years on their long-running series &#8220;Supernatural,&#8221; along with his co-star Jensen Ackles. That series will end on its fifteenth season later this year, freeing up Padalecki for this new project. 
&#8220;Walker, Texas Ranger&#8221; ran for eight seasons from 1993 to 2001 and starred Norris as the titular character, Clarence Gilyard as his partner James Trivette, Sheree J. Wilson as Assistant D.A. Alexandra &#8220;Alex&#8221; Cahill, and Noble Willingham as &#8220;semi-retired&#8221; Captain C.D. Parker. The last two seasons would add Nia Peeples and Judson Mills as fellow Rangers. The original show won several TV awards including Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for Gilyard at the 2000 NAACP Image Awards.
&#8220;Walker&#8221; crossed over with fellow law enforcement action series &#8220;Martial Law&#8221; starring Sammo Hung and spun-off the short-lived private detective show &#8220;Sons of Thunder.&#8221; Its iconic theme song &#8220;Eyes of the Ranger,&#8221; composed by Tirk Wilder and performed by Norris, was introduced midway through the second season. 
Four years after the show ended, a reunion television film, &#8220;Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire,&#8221; was produced by Paramount Network Television and aired in October 2005. Norris, Gilyard, Wilson, and Mills all reprised their roles. Though the film garnered high ratings, CBS ultimately passed on doing further projects. 
In February 2018, Chuck Norris&#8217; film company Top Kick Productions filed a lawsuit against CBS Productions in Los Angeles for over thirty million dollars in unpaid royalties over &#8220;Walker, Texas Ranger.&#8221; According to <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/cbs-legal-battles-lawsuits-history" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Fox Business</a>, the suit was forced into arbitration and its verdict is yet undecided. 
Norris currently hosts &#8220;Chuck Norris&#8217;s Epic Guide to Military Vehicles&#8221; on the History Channel.

walker_texas_ranger.jpg

CBS Rebooting Hit Series ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’

Crime

Hollywood

Texas

During a report detailing the sexual harassment allegations against international star Placido Domingo, CBS Evening News anchor Norah O&#8217;Donnell was caught on a hot mic inadvertently saying, “Sounds like somebody else here.”
The report segued to a reporter reading Domingo’s statement in the face of the accusations: “Still, it is painful to hear that I may have upset anyone or made them feel uncomfortable — no matter how long ago and despite my best intentions. I believed that all of my interactions and relationships were always welcomed and consensual.” As the reporter finished reading the second sentence, O’Donnell muttered off-screen, “Sounds like somebody else here.” Then the segment cut back to her.
<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7361189/Norah-ODonnell-makes-remarks-sexual-harassment-story-Placido-Domingo.html">The Daily Mail</a> noted that the audio was deleted later before it was on-air.
Last December, Brooks Harris, Sydney McNeal and Chelsea Wei <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-ent-charlie-rose-cbs-news-lawsuit-20181212-story.html">settled with CBS</a> after they filed suit accusing Charlie Rose of sexually harassing them and accused CBS of being “fully aware” of Rose’s actions. After the women accused Rose of sexual misconduct in November 2017, Rose was fired; O’Donnell <a href="https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/charlie-rose-fired-from-cbs-after-sexual-misconduct-allegations/">commented</a>, “This is a moment that demands a frank and honest assessment about where we stand and more generally the safety of women. Let me very clear. There is no excuse for this alleged behavior. It is systematic and pervasive. And I’ve been doing a lot of listening and I’m going to continue to do that. This I know is true: women cannot achieve equality in the workplace or in society until there is a reckoning and a taking of responsibility. I am really proud to work at CBS News, there are so many incredible people here, especially on this show. All of you here. This will be investigated; this has to end. This behavior is wrong.”
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">“This is a moment that demands a frank and honest assessment about where we stand and more generally the safety of women. Let me be very clear. There is no excuse for this alleged behavior. It is systematic and pervasive and I&#8217;ve been doing a lot of listening.&#8221; &#8212; <a href="https://twitter.com/NorahODonnell?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NorahODonnell</a> <a href="https://t.co/9P69QN7spu">pic.twitter.com/9P69QN7spu</a>
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) <a href="https://twitter.com/CBSThisMorning/status/932944777317900288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 21, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
David Rhodes, CBS president, added, “There is absolutely nothing more important, in this or any organization, than ensuring a safe, professional workplace — a supportive environment where people feel they can do their best work. We need to be such a place. I’ve often heard that things used to be different. And no one may be able to correct the past. But what may once have been accepted should not ever have been acceptable.”
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">&#8220;I’ve often heard that things used to be different. And no one may be able to correct the past. But what may once have been accepted should not ever have been acceptable,&#8221; CBS News president David Rhodes says after company terminates Charlie Rose <a href="https://t.co/FT5YejPvKv">https://t.co/FT5YejPvKv</a> <a href="https://t.co/QoDmHOMMjL">pic.twitter.com/QoDmHOMMjL</a>
— CBS News (@CBSNews) <a href="https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/933031638250000384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 21, 2017</a></blockquote>
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After former CBS chief Les Moonves left CBS in September 2018 following sexual harassment allegations against him, O’Donnell <a href="https://deadline.com/2018/09/norah-odonnell-les-moonves-exit-cbs-this-morning-1202461274/">stated</a> that Moonves had always treated her “fairly and with respect.” She added, “Still, for me it was another sleepless night thinking of the pain these women feel. The courage that it takes for women to come forward and talk about this. And I really didn’t know what I was going to say this morning &#8230;” She then referred to Rose’s firing ten months before:
<blockquote>10 months later, we’re still talking about this. But here’s what I said back then and I think it still holds and I want to say it again. There is no excuse for this alleged behavior. It’s systematic and it is pervasive in our culture. And this I know is true, to the core of my being: Women cannot achieve equality in the workplace or in society until there is a reckoning and a taking of responsibility … As a journalist, I am confident that the truth is going to come out. There are two prominent investigations going on with really good lawyers. This has to end. The story will continue.</blockquote>
Video of O&#8217;Donnell on hot mic below:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe width="698" height="573" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>

CBS Evening News with Norah O&#8217;Donnell

WATCH: CBS Anchor Mutters On Hot Mic ‘Sounds Like Somebody Else Here’ During Sexual Harassment Story

Charlie Rose

A petition to rename the one-block stretch of New York City&#8217;s Fifth Avenue where Trump Tower is located as &#8220;President Barack H. Obama Avenue&#8221; is gaining momentum, amassing over 275,000 signatures and garnering more mainstream media attention.
&#8220;Rename Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower: &#8216;PresidentBarackH.ObamaAvenue,'&#8221; the MoveOn.org petition reads. The petition&#8217;s total signatures now top 276,000, gaining over 60,000 over a span of the last 24 hours.
Addressed to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council, the petition requests that &#8220;the stretch of Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets be renamed &#8216;President Barack H. Obama Avenue.&#8217; Any addresses on that stretch of Fifth Avenue should be changed accordingly.&#8221; That block happens to include Trump Tower.
The petition presents the following background, which includes the claim that Obama&#8217;s administration was &#8220;completely scandal-free&#8221; and touts the killing of radical Islamic terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden during his tenure:
<blockquote>The City of Los Angeles recently honored former President Barack Obama by renaming a stretch of the 134 Freeway near Downtown L.A. in his honor. We request the New York City Mayor and City Council do the same by renaming a block of Fifth Avenue after the former president whose many accomplishments include: saving our nation from the Great Recession; serving two completely scandal-free terms in office; and taking out Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind September 11th, which killed over 3,000 New Yorkers.</blockquote>
In comments to <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-tower-nyc-address-obama-avenue-petition-more-than-200000-signatures-rename-5th-avenue-president-barack-obama/">CBS News</a>, the creator of the petition, Los Angeles resident Elizabeth Rowin, made clear to any who might&#8217;ve missed it why she started the petition: to &#8220;troll&#8221; Trump.
Having seen a comedian joke online in December about renaming the street after Obama to stick it to Trump, Rowin said she thought that was a &#8220;great idea&#8221; and promptly posted the petition. &#8220;I thought, &#8216;That&#8217;s a great idea and probably no one is going to do anything about it,&#8217; so I decided to do it,&#8221; she told CBS.
While the petition got some news coverage in January, it lost momentum. But after a viral tweet from a man in Scotland this week, said Rowin, the petition started to blow up. &#8220;I really didn&#8217;t think there was a chance that it could happen,&#8221; she told CBS on Wednesday.
&#8220;I think it would be fabulous. I think people feel kind of helpless right now, and it&#8217;s a way to troll him,&#8221; she added. &#8220;If he does hear about it, maybe it would slow him down and distract him.&#8221;
Rowin hopes the liberal leadership of New York City will follow Los Angeles&#8217; lead in renaming a stretch of a street after the former president, but as CBS notes, the city prohibits re-naming streets after people who are still alive. Rowin dismissed the rule as &#8220;arbitrary,&#8221; and maintained that if L.A. could do it, why not New York.
CBS cites City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who said he&#8217;s &#8220;not positive&#8221; that Rowin&#8217;s idea is &#8220;the best way&#8221; to honor Obama. &#8220;I&#8217;m pretty confident we can find a better way to honor the greatest president of my lifetime than by trolling the worst president of my lifetime,&#8221; he said. Meanwhile, New York City Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill de Blasio&#8217;s office cheered &#8220;New Yorkers&#8221; finding &#8220;creative outlets for resistance,&#8221; but says the mayor is leaving the decision to the council.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50582/watch-students-sign-petition-ban-oppressive-white-james-barrett">WATCH: Students Sign Petition To Ban ‘Oppressive’ White Stick Figure In ‘Walk’ Signals</a>

Veterans Group Protests Against President Trump Outside Of Trump Tower In New York

Petition To Rename Trump Tower’s Street To ‘Resist’ Trump Gains Momentum

Barack Obama

Bill de Blasio

Donald Trump

New York City

On Tuesday morning, CBS News <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-death-shrieking-heard-jail-cell-morning-he-died-metropolitan-correctional-center/">reported</a> that &#8220;shouting and shrieking&#8221; was heard from inside registered sex offender and multimillionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein&#8217;s jail cell at Metropolitan Correction Center the morning he died.
&#8220;CBS News has learned that the morning of Jeffrey Epstein&#8217;s death there was shouting and shrieking from his jail cell. Guards attempted to revive him while saying &#8216;breathe, Epstein, breathe,'&#8221; the report <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-death-shrieking-heard-jail-cell-morning-he-died-metropolitan-correctional-center/">said</a>.
As noted by journalist Yashar Ali, the report is not entirely clear about whom all the &#8220;shouting and shrieking&#8221; was coming from. &#8220;This CBS news story is poorly written. It&#8217;s unclear if the shrieking is from the guards or from Epstein or someone else,&#8221; Ali tweeted.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">2. This CBS news story is poorly written. It’s unclear if the shrieking is from the guards or from Epstein or someone else
— Yashar Ali (@yashar) <a href="https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1161278385529786368?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 13, 2019</a></blockquote>
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As previously noted by The Daily Wire, it was announced on Sunday night that Epstein&#8217;s autopsy had been completed, though most details of the report remain undisclosed. According to an announcement from the New York City medical examiner, his cause of death &#8220;is pending further information,&#8221; a common determination.
According to multiple media <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50485/breaking-millionaire-sex-offender-jeffrey-epstein-ashe-schow">reports</a>, Epstein was found to have allegedly hanged himself on Saturday morning in his MCC cell and was transferred to a hospital in Manhattan, where he arrived in cardiac arrest. According to CBS News, Epstein&#8217;s body was identified by his estranged brother Mark.
Chief Medical Examiner Barbara Sampson said Epstein&#8217;s representatives hired celebrity pathologist Michael Baden &#8220;to conduct an independent autopsy and they were allowed to observe the autopsy,&#8221; <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-camp-sends-pathologist-michael-baden-to-watch-over-his-autopsy">The Daily Beast</a> reported. Baden is known as the &#8220;Death Correspondent&#8221; for Fox News, <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/jeffrey-epstein-s-family-hire-celebrity-pathologist-dr-michael-baden-to-oversee-postmortem-a4211116.html">according</a> to the Evening Standard, and has been involved in the high-profile deaths of John Belushi, Anna Nicole Smith, and Michael Brown, and testified at the infamous OJ Simpson trial. The doctor has also &#8220;examined more than 20,000 bodies and was host of the HBO TV show Autopsy,&#8221; the outlet noted.
Though initial reports claimed Epstein was on suicide watch at the time of his apparent suicide, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/11/nyregion/epstein-death-manhattan-correctional-center.html">The New York Times</a> said this week that the disgraced financier was taken off suicide watch 11 days before he reportedly hanged himself.
The registered sex offender was found with marks around his neck three weeks ago, but, as noted by <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50485/breaking-millionaire-sex-offender-jeffrey-epstein-ashe-schow">The Daily Wire</a>&#8216;s Ashe Schow, it&#8217;s unclear if the injury to his neck was from a suicide attempt, an attempt to get transferred to another prison, or an attack from another inmate.
The Times also reported that Epstein was supposed to be checked on every half-hour, but the jail failed to do so. &#8220;Mr. Epstein was supposed to have been checked by the two guards in the protective housing unit every 30 minutes, but that procedure was not followed that night, a law-enforcement official with knowledge of his detention said,&#8221; the report stated.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/50529/epsteins-cellmate-transferred-hours-his-death-joseph-curl">According</a> to The Washington Post, Epstein&#8217;s cellmate was abruptly transferred to another cell on Friday, hours before Epstein hanged himself. The sudden transfer is being investigated.

CBS Report: ‘Shouting And Shrieking’ Heard From Epstein’s Jail Cell Morning Of Apparent Suicide

During an appearance on CNN Sunday, former &#8220;CBS Evening News&#8221; anchor Scott Pelley, who is now a correspondent for CBS&#8217; &#8220;60 Minutes,&#8221; dropped some bombs on his own network, particularly the former president of the news division, whom Pelley largely blamed for his ouster.
In an interview promoting his new book, &#8220;<a data-amzn-asin="B07JD93HJ9" href="https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Worth-Telling-Reporters-Meaning-ebook/dp/B07JD93HJ9">Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter&#8217;s Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times</a>,&#8221; Pelley accused management of removing him from &#8220;CBS Evening News&#8221; because he complained to management about the &#8220;hostile work environment&#8221; toward both men and women.
&#8220;I lost my job at the &#8216;Evening News&#8217; because I wouldn&#8217;t stop complaining to management about the hostile work environment,&#8221; Pelley told &#8220;Reliable Sources&#8221; host Brian Stelter, as reported by <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/ny-scott-pelley-cbs-evening-news-20190526-os22t5el3jhfde7qj64bgzi6ze-story.html">The New York Daily News</a>.
About two or three years before he was axed by the show, Pelley said, he told then-news division president David Rhodes that something must be done about how people were treated at the network. &#8220;Several years ago &#8212; four or five years ago &#8212; I went to the president of the news division and explained to him that this hostile work environment couldn&#8217;t go on for women and men,&#8221; said Pelley. &#8220;He told me that if I kept agitating about that internally, then I&#8217;d lose my job.&#8221;
After being told by the next man up the ladder at the news division (who <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/cbss-scott-pelley-blasts-former-boss-david-rhodes-for-hostile-work-environment">The Daily Beast</a> notes is presumably former CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager) that his complaints weren&#8217;t valid, Pelley said he approached then-CBS CEO and Chairman Les Moonves. Moonves, who resigned last year amid a series of #MeToo sexual harassment allegations, &#8220;listened to me very concerned for an hour, asked me some penetrating questions about what was going on,&#8221; said Pelley. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t hear back from him but in the next opportunity in my contact, I was let go from the &#8216;Evening News.'&#8221;
CBS announced on May 31, 2017 that Anthony Mason would replace Pelley, and the host officially signed off two weeks later, NY Daily News notes. Pelley was then moved over to the position of full-time correspondent with &#8220;60 Minutes,&#8221; a situation he described as &#8220;all blue sky.&#8221;
&#8220;As you say now, everything has changed,&#8221; Pelley told Stelter. &#8220;We have a new chairman of CBS Corporation, Joe Ianniello, a visionary leader. We have the first woman president of the news division, Susan Zirinsky, and I&#8217;ve known her for 30 years. &#8230; And now we have a new executive producer, Bill Owens, at 60 Minutes. It&#8217;s all blue sky from here. I&#8217;m very excited. I know these people and I know that we&#8217;re on the right track.&#8221;
Citing a &#8220;longtime CBS News insider,&#8221; The Daily Beast reports that Pelley&#8217;s &#8220;hostile work environment&#8221; complaint is likely a reference to his &#8220;ongoing &#8216;war&#8217; with Rhodes, who was known within the news division for a tough, at times intimidating, management style that demonstrated little patience for the concerns of underlings.&#8221;
In a press statement, CBS News said it &#8220;disagree[s]&#8221; with their employee&#8217;s characterization of what led to his replacement. &#8220;Scott was expressing his own opinion. We disagree. CBS News has been working hard to advocate for an inclusive, safe and dignified workplace for everyone at CBS News and Scott has been a supporter of these efforts.&#8221;
The embattled network has faced a string of ugly accusations and departures, including allegations of sexual harassment against Moonves, Flager, and former &#8220;60 Minutes&#8221; host Charlie Rose.

Pelley Drops Bomb On His Own Network: Here’s The Real Reason I Was Pulled From ‘CBS Evening News’; CBS Responds

MeToo

Before she signed the strongest anti-abortion bill in the nation on Wednesday, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey faced down a hostile question from a CBS reporter and immediately flattened her. CBS reporter Jericka Duncan asked, &#8220;Where is the money coming from to support people who aren&#8217;t ready to be mothers or aren&#8217;t financially stable to take care of a child?&#8221; Ivey fired back, &#8220;You simply cannot defer protecting the lives of unborn children because of costs.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
CBS&#8217;s <a href="https://twitter.com/Jerickaduncan?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JerickaDuncan</a> to Alabama <a href="https://twitter.com/GovernorKayIvey?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GovernorKayIvey</a> before she signed the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/AlabamaAbortionBan?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#AlabamaAbortionBan</a> bill: &#8220;Where is the money coming from to support people who aren&#8217;t ready to be mothers or aren&#8217;t financially stable to take care of a child?&#8221; Ivey fired back you can&#8217;t put a $$ on life. <a href="https://t.co/wHMCNsOsGJ">pic.twitter.com/wHMCNsOsGJ</a>
&#8212; NewsBusters (@newsbusters) <a href="https://twitter.com/newsbusters/status/1128795177815105536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 15, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Ivey served as Alabama State Treasurer from 2003 to 2011, then served as lieutenant governor from 2011 to 2017. She became Alabama&#8217;s second female governor and first female Republican governor after the resignation of Governor Robert Bentley; she won a full term in 2018.
Ivey has not flinched from holding staunchly conservative positions; in April 2017 she <a href="https://www.al.com/news/birmingham/2017/04/post_317.html">signed into law</a> a bill stating that juries that imposed capital punishment could not be overruled by judges. Frank Knaack, executive director of Alabama Appleseed, asserted, &#8220;We should all agree that if we have a death penalty then the process should be fair and accurate. SB 16 will help minimize unreliable and arbitrary death sentences and move Alabama one step closer to ending its outlier status. We commend Senator Brewbaker, Senator Sanders, and Representative England for their leadership in this effort. And, we thank Governor Ivey for her quick action to finally put an end to judicial override in Alabama.&#8221;
In May 2017, Ivey signed into law a bill that <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2017/05/crossover_voting_now_banned_in.html">prevented voters</a> from voting for one party in a primary and another party in its runoff elections. State Sen. Tom Whatley commented, &#8220;It helps the Democrats choose Democratic candidates, it helps the Republicans choose Republican candidates. It just prevents the cross-over voting so you get a pure general election with a Democrat and a Republican.&#8221;
Also in May 2017, Ivey <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/27/alabama-law-protects-confederate-monuments-removal/">signed</a> the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act of 2017, which prohibited the &#8220;relocation, removal, alteration, renaming or other disturbance of any architecturally significant building, memorial building, memorial street or monument located on public property which has been in place for 40 or more years.&#8221; Republican State Sen. Gerald Allen of Tuscaloosa commented, &#8220;Contrary to what its detractors say, the Memorial Preservation Act is intended to preserve all of Alabama&#8217;s history &#8213; the good and the bad &#8213; so our children and grandchildren can learn from the past to create a better future.&#8221;
In June 2018, Ivey signed a <a href="https://governor.alabama.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/GKI-180530-AlabamaSentry-ExecutiveMemo.pdf">memo</a> to implement the Alabama Sentry Program, which would &#8220;permit a school administrator, in a school without a school resource officer (SRO) who voluntarily secures the approval of his or her superintendent, school board and county sheriff to use lethal force to defend the students, faculty, staff, and visitors of his or her school from the threat of imminent bodily harm or death by an armed intruder.&#8221;

WATCH: CBS Reporter Fires Hostile Question At Pro-Life Alabama Governor. Governor Flattens Her.

Abortion

Alabama

The CBS drama, &#8220;The Good Fight&#8221; might be losing its showrunners after CBS (ironically) censored a segment about Chinese censorship in one of the show&#8217;s most recent episodes.
The series, a spinoff of &#8220;The Good Wife,&#8221; airs on CBS&#8217;s online platform CBS All Access and, unlike its parent program, focuses less on the soap opera-like lives of Chicago defense attorneys, and more on tackling &#8220;current events&#8221; and &#8220;Trump-era politics&#8221; and occasionally includes &#8220;an animated musical short that digs into controversial political issues of the day with an explanatory style similar to &#8216;Schoolhouse Rock!'&#8221; <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/arts/television/cbs-good-fight-chinese-censorship.html">according to The New York Times</a>.
This time, though, the short disappeared from the final program, which aired online last week, and was replaced, instead, by a black screen with white type reading, &#8220;CBS HAS CENSORED THIS CONTENT.&#8221;
It turns out, the animated short was an explanation of how China deprives its citizens of unsanitized content, and &#8220;included a host of references to topics that have been censored on the internet in China. Those include Falun Gong, a spiritual movement that is repressed by the Chinese government; Tiananmen Square, a reference to the violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989; Winnie-the-Pooh, to whom China&#8217;s president, Xi Jinping, is often compared; and the letter N, used by critics of the recent change to the Chinese Constitution that lets Mr. Xi stay in power indefinitely.&#8221;
CBS reportedly panicked over the short, fearing that Chinese broadcasters, who syndicate some of the All Access programming, would terminate their relationships with the network over the short, and would &#8220;expose the greater CBS family to further repercussions,&#8221; <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/arts/television/cbs-good-fight-chinese-censorship.html">according to IndieWire</a>.
&#8220;We had concerns with some subject matter in the episode&#8217;s animated short. This is the creative solution that we agreed upon with the producers,&#8221; the network added in a statement.
The network&#8217;s brass informed &#8220;The Good Fight&#8221; showrunners that they&#8217;d be pulling the short, prompting the showrunners to threaten to quit.
&#8220;In response, the [showrunners] reportedly told CBS that they would halt production on the show if the segment was excised completely,&#8221; IndieWire reports, and the pair were forced to reach a compromise with the network, where the censorship message would appear onscreen for around ten seconds during the part of the show that would have hosted the musical short.
Ultimately, the censorship message served to reinforce the point being made by &#8220;The Good Fight&#8221; writers: that the Chinese market is so huge, it&#8217;s able to exert undue pressure on American broadcasters who need the Chinese market to survive. The issue has become especially difficult to navigate recently, as Chinese censors have <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2165274/chinese-censors-are-clamping-down-foreign-tv-shows-videos">greatly limited how much foreign content</a> is being shown on Chinese networks and in Chinese movie theaters. Each individual program must now be vetted by Chinese authorities and no foreign program can be shown on television during prime time.
American networks, like CBS, are often willing to comply with China&#8217;s rules in order to keep making money from the country&#8217;s consumers. Films like &#8220;Bohemian Rhapsody&#8221; and &#8220;Rocketman&#8221; were both censored for &#8220;offensive&#8221; content in order to make it into the Chinese market.

CBS ‘The Good Fight’ Showrunners Threaten To Quit After Network Cuts Segment About Chinese Censorship

Censorship

China

The tourist who was kidnapped in Uganda appeared to offer compassion for her captors, saying they &#8220;protected&#8221; her and treated her well.
Kimberly Endicott was following her dream of touring a wildlife park in Uganda when she and her guide were kidnapped and a ransom was demanded. An unknown sum appears to have been paid for her safe return, and Endicott has now given her first interview following her ordeal. She told &#8220;CBS This Morning&#8221; co-host Gayle King in <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-tourist-kidnapped-uganda-kimberly-endicott-says-captors-were-also-her-protectors/">an interview</a> that she tried to connect with her captors after seeing how beautiful the night sky was in Africa.
&#8220;It&#8217;s nothing like I&#8217;ve ever seen before. And that was when I became very aware of humanizing myself to them,&#8221; she told King. &#8220;I said, &#8216;Look at the sky.&#8217; I said, &#8216;We don&#8217;t have this at home.'&#8221;
She said at one point she laid down from exhaustion and when she woke up, she saw that her captors had made her a tent &#8220;out of tarps and a mosquito net.&#8221;
&#8220;I remember that was the moment where I thought, &#8216;Why are they taking such good care of me?&#8217;&#8221; she said.
She said she started talking to them just as she would anyone else and watched them drink water from a &#8220;hole in the ground&#8221; while providing her bottled water. She said she couldn&#8217;t help but feel compassion for them.
&#8220;&#8216;Cause that&#8217;s their life. It&#8217;s not really above living like an animal. That&#8217;s their life. If I survive this, I have a life to go back to. That&#8217;s their life,&#8221; Endicott told CBS. &#8220;That does not condone what they did. Not even close.&#8221;
She also said the men let her call her daughter once, and thought at one point the U.S. government was doing nothing to help her. She said a woman from the Ugandan Wildlife Authority met her captors and provided payment, then escorted her back to safety.
&#8220;When we pulled into Ishasha Camp I realized just what my government did for me. And I was overcome with shame for thinking they didn&#8217;t do anything. And gratitude like I&#8217;ve never felt in my life,&#8221; Endicott said.
Endicott called her captors her &#8220;protectors,&#8221; and pointed out how things could have been worse for her.
&#8220;They could&#8217;ve sold me to a different group. When I went out in the open they had guns that also protected me. It could&#8217;ve been so much worse than it was,&#8221; she told CBS.
Still, she said she was experiencing trauma from the ordeal.
&#8220;Certain things will trigger me. We went for a walk out at a nature area and it just triggered me like nobody&#8217;s business. The sound of our feet on the ground, pushing bushes out of my way &#8211; and so I&#8217;m getting in touch with that there&#8217;s gonna be that probably for a while,&#8221; Endicott said.
She also believes her kidnapping is not the norm in Uganda, and that tourism should not decline.
&#8220;That was the other thing. That feeling of what this is gonna do to that country that is run by their people and those are immensely friendly, accommodating people. And everyone in hospitality after you would have a conversation, the last thing they said to you was, &#8216;please tell all of your friends to come,'&#8221; she said.

Woman Kidnapped In Uganda Defends Her Captors: ‘They Had Guns That Also Protected Me’

Africa

On Saturday, CBS News posted a <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/border-business-immigration-coyotes-cbsn-originals/">rather unusual story</a> that seems to mollycoddle and glorify a group of individuals of a rather unique &#8220;profession&#8221;: Human smugglers.
Yes, really.
Per <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/border-business-immigration-coyotes-cbsn-originals/">CBS News</a>:
<blockquote>
Along the Panama-Colombia border lies 60 miles of dense forest where smugglers known as coyotes guide migrants seeking passage north, for the right price.
Emerson Gonzalez Jimenez said he typically charges $700 to get people safely from Capurgana, Colombia, to Bajo Chiquito, Panama. He said he sometimes makes exceptions and lowers the cost, especially if he encounters migrants who were abandoned by their group. &#8220;Many get lost. They lose the path,&#8221; said Gonzalez Jimenez.
&#8220;I helped a lot of people, particularly women with children,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Because many have passed through here and not made it.&#8221; &#8230;
These hazards create an economic opportunity for men like Gonzalez Jimenez. &#8230;
&#8220;Most people think we (smugglers) are bad,&#8221; Gonzalez Jimenez said. &#8220;But if a person needs to go from there to here, and can&#8217;t do it&#8230; and they tell me, &#8216;I&#8217;m going to pay you five, 10, 20 dollars&#8230; to take me to whatever location.&#8217; And if I didn&#8217;t have a job at the time&#8230; to me, that&#8217;s good.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Well, then.
As The Daily Caller <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/01/cbs-news-coyotes-helping-migrants/">notes</a>, many conservatives did not react particularly well to this bit of hard-cutting &#8220;journalism&#8221; &#8212; journalism that &#8220;tr[ies] to put a positive spin on the people who routinely endanger the lives of vulnerable illegal immigrants.&#8221;
&#8220;Among liberal activists and their allies in the mainstream media, there&#8217;s a reluctance to acknowledge the darker side of the migrant crisis&#8212;or even admit that it&#8217;s a crisis at all,&#8221; tweeted John Daniel Davidson of The Federalist. &#8220;Hence CBS&#8217;s portrayal of two migrant smugglers as humanitarians.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Among liberal activists and their allies in the mainstream media, there&#8217;s a reluctance to acknowledge the darker side of the migrant crisis&#8212;or even admit that it&#8217;s a crisis at all. Hence CBS&#8217;s portrayal of two migrant smugglers as humanitarians. <a href="https://twitter.com/FDRLST?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@FDRLST</a> <a href="https://t.co/6HObmF6UPn">https://t.co/6HObmF6UPn</a>
&#8212; John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) <a href="https://twitter.com/johnddavidson/status/1112728990068998146?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 1, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
&#8220;Finally lived long enough to get so hyper-woke about applauding illegal immigration that we got a sympathetic piece from the network news about how underappreciated human traffickers are,&#8221; sarcastically tweeted Jeff Blehar.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Finally lived long enough to get so hyper-woke about applauding illegal immigration that we got a sympathetic piece from the network news about how underappreciated human traffickers are. <a href="https://t.co/bSfyEmGijo">https://t.co/bSfyEmGijo</a>
&#8212; Esoteric Jeff (@EsotericCD) <a href="https://twitter.com/EsotericCD/status/1112345342274605056?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 31, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Caleb Howe, writing at <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/news/coyotes-trafficking-cbs-border">TheBlaze</a>, opines that the backlash to CBS News amounts to &#8220;the internet mob get[ting] it right&#8221;:
<blockquote>
A backlash on social media isn&#8217;t a reliable gauge of whether a person or story is correct or a take is good or bad, but sometimes even the internet mob gets it right. That is the case with the tremendous negative response to a story that was tweeted by CBS News over the weekend praising so-called &#8220;coyotes.&#8221; &#8230;
A 2010 report from the United Nations estimated the revenue generated by the network of coyotes smuggling people from Central and South America into the U.S. at about $6.6 billion, annually. Migrants hoping to make their way here can pay anywhere from $4,000 to over $10,000 dollars for the services of a coyote. That&#8217;s per person. From within Mexico prices can be considerably less, as low as below a thousand.
Even without a criminal element to contend with, the &#8220;business&#8221; is incredibly risky. It involves paying bribes to government officials in multiple countries, paying off the drug cartels, hiding in safe houses, and arduous hiking through jungles, across open terrain, all the belongings you can carry on your back, and often with inadequate supplies.
</blockquote>
As even The New York Times has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/us/border-rapes-migrant-women.html">reported</a>, sexual assault from coyotes and traffickers is a huge humanitarian problem on the U.S.-Mexico border: &#8220;On America&#8217;s southern border, migrant women and girls are the victims of sexual assaults that most often go unreported, uninvestigated and unprosecuted. &#8230; The stories are many, and yet all too similar. Undocumented women making their way into American border towns have been beaten for disobeying smugglers, impregnated by strangers, coerced into prostitution, shackled to beds and trees and &#8212; in at least a handful of cases &#8212; bound with duct tape, rope or handcuffs.&#8221;
Someone ought to inform CBS News.

CBS News Posts Unusual Story Glorifying Human Traffickers

Human Trafficking

Media

A majority of Americans now believe that the special counsel&#8217;s investigation into whether President Donald Trump colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election was &#8220;politically motivated,&#8221; a sharp increase from when the poll was last conducted in January &#8212; before the investigation was completed.
The news comes from <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mueller-report-majorities-across-party-lines-want-full-report-released-says-cbs-news-poll/">a recent CBS News poll</a>, conducted between March 25 and March 26, which found 54% of respondents believe the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was &#8220;politically motivated,&#8221; compared to 37% who believe it was &#8220;justified.&#8221;
The poll was previously conducted in January and, at that time, found 50% of respondents believed the investigation was &#8220;justified&#8221; and 45% said it was &#8220;politically motivated.&#8221;
While this appears to be the biggest nugget of information from the poll, it was not the hook CBS used to report on its own poll. In fact, it was the last point mentioned in the media outlet&#8217;s report on the poll, and while every other point in the article received its own tweet, the information about whether the probe was justified or politically motivated did not.
&#8220;Mueller report: Majorities across party lines want full report released, CBS News poll says,&#8221; was the headline the outlet used. Four people have a byline on the story, which includes a paragraph or two about five different findings in the poll. The fact that the outlet ran with how many people want the report released shows how they wanted to bury the findings of political motivation. There was never a question about whether the Mueller report would be released. The White House never objected to it and neither did Attorney General William Barr, who said this week the report would be released &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45256/watch-lindsey-graham-says-trump-wants-mueller-ashe-schow">sometime in April, probably</a>.&#8221; True, he said that when the poll was being conducted, but at no time did anyone except left-wing media outlets suggest the report would not be released.
The poll also found that 34% of respondents feel the Mueller report &#8212; which found no collusion and not enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction &#8212; &#8220;has cleared Trump,&#8221; compared to 23% who think it &#8220;hasn&#8217;t cleared Trump.&#8221; Another 36% think it&#8217;s &#8220;too soon to say&#8221; whether the report cleared the president.
Drilling down into the parties, the CBS poll found 66% of Democrats want members of their party in congress to continue investigating the matter. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has been more than happy to oblige.
Further, the poll found that 50% of Democrats were &#8220;disappointed&#8221; in Mueller&#8217;s findings, while 69% of Republicans were &#8220;pleased.&#8221; More Americans (44%) thought the investigation was conducted &#8220;fairly,&#8221; than &#8220;unfairly&#8221; (10%). Forty percent said it was too soon to say.
CBS sent out four separate tweets about the poll on Wednesday. The outlet&#8217;s poll Twitter account did not include the chart about people thinking the investigation was &#8220;politically motivated.&#8221; It included all the other points brought up in the article. CBS&#8217;s main Twitter account also made no mention of what poll respondents thought of the motivation behind the Mueller investigation.

After Mueller Finds No Collusion, Americans Now Believe Russia Probe Was ‘Politically Motivated’

Robert Mueller

Russia

Former CBS News foreign correspondent Lara Logan doubled-down on her criticism of the liberal media echo-chamber during a Wednesday night appearance on Fox News&#8217; &#8220;Hannity.&#8221;
And this time she named names: CNN&#8217;s Brian Stelter, The Huffington Post&#8217;s Michael Calderon, and Joe Hagan, who&#8217;s currently at Vanity Fair, are just some of the media players who&#8217;ve targeted Logan for daring to report accurately and drop the liberal talking points, said the former &#8220;60 Minutes&#8221; correspondent.
Earlier in the week, Logan sparked headlines for <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43610/propagandists-emmy-award-winning-journalist-lara-amanda-prestigiacomo">telling</a> retired Navy SEAL and &#8220;Mike Drop&#8221; podcast host Mike Ritland that the overwhelmingly liberal media have dropped even the pretense of objectivity, likening most journalists to &#8220;activists&#8221; and &#8220;propagandists.&#8221;
Fox host Sean Hannity applauded Logan for her bravery, noting that speaking such truths could be career suicide &#8212; a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43610/propagandists-emmy-award-winning-journalist-lara-amanda-prestigiacomo">comment</a> Logan made herself during the &#8220;Mike Drop&#8221; appearance.
Logan said the targeting of her has already started back up since the podcast, telling Hannity:
<blockquote>
It&#8217;s the same group of people; they&#8217;re already starting to target me again now. And I expected it. I was joking that I am braced for fire and fury, because I know they are going to come after me again, and I&#8217;m not the only one. I mean, the same people come after you, right? One of them: The Sparrow Project. I mean, this person was tweeting today: &#8220;Hannity, watch out about Lara Logan&#8217;s stuff.&#8221; And there&#8217;s more coming. Michael Calderon, who was at The Huffington Post. I can literally give you the script now. I can tell you who the players are: Joe Hagan, Brian Stelter. I mean, it&#8217;s the same people all the time and they&#8217;re all saying the same things.
</blockquote>
Logan emphasized that it is not just her; any journalist who steps out of line will be targeted: &#8220;And they come after Sharyl Attkisson, they come after you, they come after me. If there were any independent voices out there, if there are any journalists who are not beating the same drum and giving the same talking points, then we pay the price.&#8221;
&#8220;You know what is interesting, Sean?&#8221; she continued. &#8220;They cannot take down the substance of what you&#8217;re saying, right? They cannot go after the things that matter. So they smear you personally. They go after your integrity. They go after your reputation as a person and a professional. They will stop at nothing. I am not the only one.&#8221;
Logan made it clear that she is not &#8220;owned&#8221; by anyone.
&#8220;And I am just, I am done, right? I am tired of it. And they do not get to write my story anymore. They do not get to speak for me. I want to say loudly and clearly to anybody who is listening: I am not owned. Nobody owns me, right? I&#8217;m not owned by the left. I&#8217;m not owned by the right.&#8221;
Hannity interjected, &#8220;I do not even know what your politics are &#8211; I really don&#8217;t.&#8221;
&#8220;And it does not matter,&#8221; she responded. &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to lie to you and pretend that I have no biases &#8230; That is a part of who we are as human beings. We all have opinions on things. I don&#8217;t pretend that I don&#8217;t have opinions.&#8221;
During the &#8220;Mike Drop&#8221; podcast, Logan said that it&#8217;s a &#8220;fact&#8221; that the &#8220;media everywhere is mostly liberal.&#8221;
&#8220;In this country, 85% of journalists are registered Democrats &#8211; that&#8217;s just a fact,&#8221; said Logan. &#8220;No one is registering Democrat when they&#8217;re really a Republican. So, the facts are on the side that you just stated: most journalists are Left, or liberal, or Democrat, or whatever word you wanna give it. How do you know you&#8217;re being lied to? How do you know you&#8217;re being manipulated? How do you know there&#8217;s something not right with the coverage? When they simplify it all and there&#8217;s no gray. There&#8217;s no gray. It&#8217;s all one way. Well, life isn&#8217;t like that. If it doesn&#8217;t match real life, it&#8217;s probably not &#8212; there&#8217;s something wrong.&#8221;
WATCH:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-libDXHmUT4" width="853"></iframe></div>
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43679/cbs-lara-logan-just-exposed-leftist-media-bias-ben-shapiro">CBS&#8217; Lara Logan Just Exposed Leftist Media Bias. Again. So Why Do So Many Media Members Ignore The Criticism?</a>

CBS’ Lara Logan Calls Out Liberal Media Attackers BY NAME In ‘Hannity’ Interview: ‘I Am Not Owned’

President Donald Trump can breathe a sigh of relief! Ardent anti-Trump former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) has ruled out a 2020 primary challenge against the sitting president, opting for a contributor position with CBS News instead.
The former senator announced the move on CBS &#8220;This Morning.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;ve always said that I do hope there is a Republican who challenges President Trump,&#8221; said Flake. &#8220;That will not be me.&#8221;
Flake admitted that &#8220;there really isn&#8217;t a path&#8221; for a Trump challenger on the Republican side, but added that he&#8217;s still hopeful for one.
&#8220;The RNC (Republican National Committee) and the president&#8217;s campaign are now melded. They&#8217;re trying to do anything they can to squelch any opposition. I still hope that some, and some are still talking about, do run. I think that&#8217;s healthy, and I&#8217;m not a fan of this president. But that won&#8217;t be me.&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
NEW &#8212; &#8220;That won&#8217;t be me.&#8221; &#8212; Jeff Flake closes the door on a 2020 primary challenge to President Trump: <a href="https://t.co/LCjsYiaaeB">pic.twitter.com/LCjsYiaaeB</a>
&#8212; J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) <a href="https://twitter.com/jiveDurkey/status/1090249176628248581?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 29, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Flake will be working on a new series for the network called &#8220;Common Ground.&#8221;
&#8220;Common ground may be hard to find in Washington, but it is found everywhere else in the country. I look forward to working with CBS on this new series,&#8221; wrote Flake in a Tuesday morning tweet.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Common ground may be hard to find in Washington, but it is found everywhere else in the country. I look forward to working with CBS on this new series <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CommonGround?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CommonGround</a> <a href="https://t.co/SmUnfGl2bL">https://t.co/SmUnfGl2bL</a>
&#8212; Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffFlake/status/1090270152648736768?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 29, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Donald Trump Jr. was quick to react to the news, taking a jab at Flake on Twitter. &#8220;Shocked that Jeff flake who wouldn&#8217;t have come close to winning his home district isn&#8217;t going to run for president,&#8221; wrote the eldest Trump son. &#8220;I thought he was a real contender. Maybe try for dog catcher!&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Shocked that Jeff flake who wouldn&#8217;t have come close to winning his home district isn&#8217;t going to run for president.
I thought he was a real contender
Maybe try for dog catcher!
&#8212; Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) <a href="https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1090242453834211329?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 29, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
Flake was <a href="https://www.countable.us/articles/1310-jeff-flake-announces-retirement-excoriates-trump">praised by the Left</a> when he announced his retirement on the Senate floor in 2017 and ripped the president and the Republican Party.
&#8220;It is often said that children are watching. Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, Why didn&#8217;t you do something? Why didn&#8217;t you speak up? &#8212; what are we going to say?&#8221; he <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/24/politics/jeff-flake-retirement-speech-full-text/index.html">said</a>.
&#8220;Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough,&#8221; Flake continued. &#8220;We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes normal. With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it. We know better than that. By now, we all know better than that.&#8221;
Flake&#8217;s apparently standing up to mean ol&#8217; Trump with his new CBS position, a move which no one saw coming &#8230;

Jeff Flake Rules Out Primary Challenge To Trump, Signs With CBS News. Don Jr. Roasts Him.

Arizona

Jeff Flake

Actress Eliza Dushku, perhaps still best known for her role as Faith on &#8220;Buffy the Vampire Slayer,&#8221; broke her silence Wednesday about her $9.5 million settlement with CBS that details her accusations against her fellow &#8220;Bull&#8221; co-star Michael Weatherly, showrunner Glenn Gordon Caron (former &#8220;Moonlighting&#8221; writer), and the network.
In a piece published by <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/12/19/eliza-dushku-responds-what-happened-cbs-took-job-and-because-objected-being-sexually-harassed-was-fired/OCh7h0pwg4Aq7xfwOUasyO/story.html">The Boston Globe</a>, &#8203;Dushku explains that she felt compelled to present her account because of The New York Times exposé on her settlement, for which she&#8217;d declined an interview in an attempt to &#8220;honor the terms of my settlement with the network.&#8221;
&#8220;I was under the impression that Weatherly and Caron would also not respond per our settlement. Instead, both commented to the Times in what amounted to more deflection, denial, and spin,&#8221; she writes.
Dushku begins by providing some context for her blow-up with Weatherly, Caron and the network, noting that CBS &#8220;vigorously courted&#8221; her for several shows and presented her role in &#8220;Bull&#8221; as a true co-lead in the mode of &#8220;Moonlighting,&#8221; intended to &#8220;balance&#8221; the womanizing lead played by Weatherly. In fact, that crucial male-female balance was one of the reasons Caron was brought in at the end of season one.
&#8220;And so I was hired to finish the last three episodes of season one, with CBS&#8217;s expressed intention of my beginning season two as a series regular with an option for up to six seasons,&#8221; she writes. But things went south quickly.
&#8220;Weatherly harassed me from early on,&#8221; Dushku states. &#8220;The tapes show his offer to take me to his &#8216;rape van, filled with all sorts of lubricants and long phallic things.&#8217; There was also his constant name-calling; playing provocative songs (like &#8216;Barracuda&#8217;) on his iPhone when I approached my set marks; and his remark about having a threesome. He made the threesome remark to me about himself and me in a room full of people. Minutes later, a crew member sidled up next to me and, with a smirk, said in a low voice, &#8216;I&#8217;m with Bull. I wanna have a threesome with you too.'&#8221;
As the recordings show, she writes, Weatherly repeatedly made sexual jokes over a period of weeks, including some mock &#8220;penis jousting with a male costar&#8221; following the &#8220;threesome&#8221; comment, calling her &#8220;legs,&#8221; and making &#8220;audible groans, oohing and aahing&#8221; while discussing her beauty.
&#8220;As the tapes show, he liked to boast about his sperm and vasectomy reversals (&#8216;I want you to know, Eliza, I have powerful swimmers&#8217;),&#8221; she writes. &#8220;Weatherly had a habit of exaggerated eye-balling and leering at me; once, he leaned into my body and inhaled, smelling me in a dramatic swoon. As was caught on tape, after I flubbed a line, he shouted in my face, &#8216;I will take you over my knee and spank you like a little girl.'&#8221;
After putting up with this for weeks, she says she attempted to resolve the issue &#8220;directly&#8221; but as &#8220;diplomatic[ally]&#8221; as possible with Weatherly, asking him to be her &#8220;ally&#8221; to &#8220;help ease the sexualized set comments.&#8221;
&#8220;Eliza, no one respects women more than I do,&#8221; he said, according to Dushku, even going so far as describing him as being &#8220;too respectful&#8221; of the opposite sex.
The result, as she found out later, was that &#8220;Weatherly texted CBS Television President David Stapf about 40 minutes after our conversation and asked for what amounted to my being written off the show&#8221; because of her &#8220;humor deficit.&#8221;
Dushku&#8217;s case is not the only sexual harassment scandal haunting CBS: the network is <a href="https://variety.com/2018/biz/news/cbs-news-challenges-60-minutes-cbs-this-morning-1203092718/">bracing for a major shake-up</a> after the ouster of former CEO Leslie Moonves and host Charlie Rose over the last year amid similarly ugly allegations.
<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/12/19/eliza-dushku-responds-what-happened-cbs-took-job-and-because-objected-being-sexually-harassed-was-fired/OCh7h0pwg4Aq7xfwOUasyO/story.html">Read Duskhu&#8217;s full account here</a>.

‘Buffy’ Star Breaks Silence On CBS Sexual Harassment Case

Sexual Harassment

Ricky Williams, Terrell Owens, and Simeon Rice are just a few names of former NFL players who have announced plans to form a new player-friendly, political activism-promoting football league named the Freedom Football League. 
&#8220;The purpose of this league is about community and the development of players,&#8221; Williams told <a href="http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/25470052/former-nfl-players-plan-launch-freedom-football-league">ESPN</a>. The FFL, he explained, will be &#8220;partly owned by the players, partly owned by the fans, and partly owned by the operators.&#8221; 
&#8220;In thinking about creating this league, I wanted to create a league that I could have stayed in and been comfortable and really thrived,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The NFL started a long time ago, and since then a lot of things have changed. And we want to create a league that&#8217;s ready for that change and invite some more of it.&#8221;
He added that the FFL currently has about one hundred stakeholders, with fifty former NFL players. Its season will run during the spring.
&#8220;And it&#8217;s for the fans and it&#8217;s by the players,&#8221; he said. &#8220;It all started with a bunch of guys sitting around a table, talking about the good old days and realizing, &#8216;You know? We have a lot of experience. We&#8217;ve been there before, we know how to do it, what if we started a league and really made it about developing young men?'&#8221;
Williams told &#8220;Outside The Lines&#8221; that &#8220;we&#8217;re trying to develop young men&#8221; and will encourage their players to engage in political activism outside of playing the game.
&#8220;You can&#8217;t take away their voice and expect them to develop,&#8221; he said. &#8220;When I grew up watching football, I really wanted to be like Jim Brown, not because of what he did on a field, but because he could take that platform and have a voice. And so, when I got to the NFL expecting that to be the case, anytime a big social issue came up we were told: &#8216;Be quiet&#8230; It&#8217;s a distraction.&#8217; And so really [we&#8217;re] changing the conversation.&#8221;
According to <a href="https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2809557-terrell-owens-ricky-williams-among-founding-owners-of-freedom-football-league">The Bleacher Report</a>, ten teams are planned for the start of the season: the San Diego Warriors, Oklahoma City Power, Portland Progress, Texas Revolution, Ohio Players, Florida Strong, Birmingham Kings, St. Louis Independence, Connecticut Underground and Oakland Panthers. 
CBS Sports <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ricky-williams-announces-freedom-football-league-run-by-former-players-including-terrell-owens/">reports</a> that former San Franciso 49ers quarterback Jeff Garcia and former Super Bowl MVP Dexter Jackson are among the founders. 
The FFL <a href="https://www.freedomfootball.co/why-ffl/">website</a> echoes the founders&#8217; displeasure with how the NFL has been run in recent years.
<blockquote>
The current NFL ownership, with a market capitalization of over $100 billion is closely held and controlled by 32 wealthy billionaire families and generates, on average, over $100 million of annual profits per team per year. This ownership schism creates an exploitative dynamic between ownership and the players and coaches, neglects the long-term health and well-being of the players, and gouges the fans with outrageous ticket prices. The FFL is rethinking all aspects of the game of football and it starts with the ownership and money.
</blockquote>
This new league follows in the footsteps of the XFL, AFL, AAFL, and the LFL.

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