It should have been something of a signal that trouble was afoot at CBS News when the network unloaded Norah O’Donnell, the lead anchor of its evening news broadcast. O’Donnell’s reputation wasn’t particularly shiny, and the ratings reflected that.
But getting rid of O’Donnell changed absolutely nothing, and in the past week, CBS has gone completely over the falls.
Now that O’Donnell is out of the way we’re getting a fuller dose of Margaret Brennan, whose AWFL sensibilities appear to be advanced beyond what mainstream America could be expected to tolerate.
But tolerate it we must, apparently. Because Brennan is now CBS’s assigned interrogator of the Trump administration. Regardless of how badly that’s going.
You’ve almost certainly ingested the brilliance of the “I Don’t Really Care, Margaret” meme, which came from her disqualifying performance attempting to interview Vice President JD Vance on the network’s “Face The Nation” Sunday show. Brennan was arguing with Vance over the obviously poor results we’ve received from inviting in unvetted migrants from some of the world’s worst places, and she objected to his noticing that one of those, an Afghan who had conducted a stabbing spree in Oklahoma, had provided a shining example of his point. That led to this…
As I’ve written before, that should have been the end of Margaret Brennan as a major figure at CBS News. When you’re the butt of one of the most viral memes in American political history, you no longer have a viable journalistic brand — or, at minimum, what’s left of you must be rebuilt either at the local level or in a different venue, like for example as a fashion correspondent or as a sideline reporter during coverage of women’s college basketball. (READ MORE: Five Quick Things: Scenes From a Commonsense Revolution)
But that’s not what happened to Margaret Brennan. It might have been a lot better over the long haul if it had.
She reappeared on Saturday’s CBS Evening News broadcast talking about the historic, substantive, and pointed speech Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference, in which he read Europeans the riot act over the ugly turn of their political elite against basic values like free expression while at the same time embracing the same sort of unvetted, unfettered Third World migration that his “I Don’t Really Care, Margaret” moment came from. (RELATED: Vance and Ukraine at the Munich Security Conference)
It’s relatively clear that Vance struck a chord with the common people in Europe as he has with Americans in speaking truth to the power elite of their countries. But he definitely didn’t strike a chord with Brennan, who said this…
And that led to a moment that dropped “I Don’t Really Care, Margaret” into second place among Margaret Brennan’s list of catastrophic failures…
Margaret Brennan embarrasses herself again
MB: “You’re standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to commit a genocide.”
Rubio: “Free speech was not weaponized to commit a genocide. The genocide was committed by an authoritarian Nazi regime.”pic.twitter.com/Yq8eji9YEa
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) February 16, 2025
How catastrophic.
Remember, Brennan was the “moderator,” along with O’Donnell, of CBS’s televised vice presidential debate between Vance and Tim Walz last year, and she was the censorious dunce who cut Vance’s microphone off as he sought to inform the public over the nature of the CBP One app through which hundreds of thousands of migrants — like the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio — had entered the country.
So we’ve got a clear pattern here.
That CBS News is treating Brennan as its star reporter is awfully instructive. She’d be bounced out of that role in anything resembling a meritocracy for the damage she’d already done before Rubio took her to the woodshed over the idiotic contention that too much free speech led to the Holocaust. And you’d have to think she’s on her way out now that CBS News is the biggest laughingstock in American media thanks to that exchange.
Except you’d be wrong.
Because the rot at CBS News goes a whole lot deeper than Margaret Brennan. Here is a segment from Sunday’s edition of “60 Minutes” which picked up on Vance’s warning to the Europeans about censorship…
In other words, CBS tells us, they’ll see our Margaret Brennan and raise us a Sharyn Alfonsi.
Maybe it was a coincidence that “60 Minutes” had a piece on the virtues of German criminalization of political dissent spooled and ready for Sunday, just a couple of days after Vance’s speech warning of European censorship. Or maybe it was in the can just waiting for a news hook, or it was put together in advance of the upcoming German elections, in which AfD, the “far right” party that is far and away the most popular in the country, will likely win if they aren’t throttled by the country’s socialist ruling elite.
Or maybe “60 Minutes” rushed it out as a rebuttal to Vance.
That’s what it looks like, after all. It’s not exactly what you’d call a balanced story.
Alfonsi has five interviews for that segment. Three of them are prosecutors who are actively ruining the lives and finances of thousands of German citizens because they’ve said rude or impolitic things on social media, one is a far-left “activist” working for some “anti-hate” NGO that almost assuredly has gotten funding out of your tax dollar through USAID or some other ruling-elite slush fund, and the last one is a dumpy communist Green Party politician who sued Facebook over being trolled relentlessly for her stupid political views and other things and managed to win. (RELATED: Are the Protests in Slovakia Due to NGO and USAID Interference?)
Did Alfonsi bother to interview anybody critical of the German cops smashing down doors to pilfer the laptops and cell phones of internet trolls and AfD voters? Nope.
Did she speak to any free-speech advocates? Nuh-uh.
Did she interview anyone who’s been arrested for having disfavored opinions or less-than-erudite delivery of the same? Nah.
So this was an advocacy piece in support of sending police to arrest people for saying things the government doesn’t like on the internet. And it ran on national TV in the United States two days after our vice president went to the country where it was happening and suggested it wasn’t a good idea.
It’s really hard to give CBS News the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t taking an editorial position that, directly contra Vance’s statements, America should become more like Germany in suppressing the kind of speech the folks in the CBS newsroom don’t like.
This same crowd is overwrought and beclowning themselves over the idea the Associated Press wouldn’t be part of the White House press pool and thinks that’s a violation of free speech. But of course, you shouldn’t be surprised at that.
So if you thought Margaret Brennan was the chief remaining problem at CBS News, you thought wrong.
It turns out that everything about CBS News is a problem. This is, after all, the network that we now know ran a propagandistic edit of a disastrous Kamala Harris interview to help her hopeless campaign, which could well result in a ruinous legal defeat at Trump’s hands. And now they’re openly pining for an American government that runs roughshod over free speech the way the Germans do over, for example, the opinions of AfD party members. (RELATED: FCC Pulls a ‘60 Minutes’ on ‘60 Minutes’)
At some point, it’s worth wondering how much longer the network holds on to its broadcast license.
Because if CBS thinks it’s cool to censor speech the government doesn’t like, then what could possibly be their objection to a little rough treatment at Trump’s hands?
And if the viewing public is subjected to less ignorant questions from Margaret Brennan or fascistic “news” segments from Sharyn Alfonsi, one can imagine journalism and free speech suffering very little in the bargain.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Five Quick Things: The Glitch McConnell Solo Act
The Left’s Crisis Might Be Getting Started. Ours Is Actually Ending.
