I grew up in the late 1960s and 1970s watching the CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite. Watching him almost every weekday at 6:30 p.m. not only kept me well informed about current events, but his broadcast was almost like a relaxing ritual after dinner. Many Americans considered him the most trusted television journalist in the country for reporting the news both within the U.S. and abroad until he retired on March 6, 1981 ending his career with his longtime sign-off “And that’s the way it is.”
It was only during graduate school (1986-87) while I was writing a research paper comparing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-89) with the American war in South Vietnam (1965-75) that I realized that Cronkite had seriously violated the ethics of journalistic objectivity. He reported with dubious video evidence and interviews that the Tet Offensive, which occurred when the Viet Cong suddenly attacked almost all of South Vietnam on January 30, 1968, was a Viet Cong victory. To the contrary, Cronkite was greatly mistaken because it was a devastating and permanent defeat for the Viet Cong.
Even President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1965-69) said on February 27, 1968, “if I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” That was the journalistic power and political influence of Walter Cronkite.
Since July 15, 2019 I have regularly been watching the CBS Evening News With Norah O’Donnell because I needed to watch some mainstream news every day in addition to reading the New York Times. I also thought that O’Donnell presented herself well, the news was interesting, and she appeared reasonably objective. Or at least I thought she was.
I recently read in the New York Post on November 4 with great disgust how former CBS News investigator Catharine Herridge, who is highly respected and fired last February, that CBS deliberately suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election. In the Post headline reporting the laptop scandal, Herridge simply stated, “I felt sick.”
As the Post explained, “CBS News went to great lengths to squash correspondent Catherine Herridge’s reporting about the Hunter Biden laptop just weeks before the 2020 election, the award-winning investigative journalist claimed.” The Post continued, “Herridge revealed she brought evidence to CBS News executive Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews [who resigned July 17] and “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell, in early October 2020 that the laptop contained material about “a million-dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm,” along with incriminating business texts and emails” from Hunter Biden.
It surely sounded like Beijing paid off Hunter in the mega millions of dollars during and immediately after his daddy was vice president of the U.S. Can you imagine if Donald Trump, Jr. and his father had a similar corrupt financial relationship with Communist China after January 20, 2017? I cannot because that would have been unimaginable, and the mainstream news media would have crucified them.
I am certain that these politically devastating emails and other gleaned financial “secrets” from Hunter Biden’s laptop greatly implicated “the big guy” or Joe Biden. But apparently CBS News was totally in the tank for the degenerate crack-cocaine addicted Hunter, his leeching extended family and especially his cognitively impaired father for the millions of dollars paid to him from 2009 to 2018.
This cover-up also negatively implicated all fifty-one dishonest intelligence agency consultants and officials such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell, who claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the classic earmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation. All these intelligence officials completely failed to do their due diligence and remain politically neutral. In plain words, they all lied.
Apparently, CBS News, which is owned by Paramount Global, not only “squashed” the story in favor of Joe Biden winning the presidency, but suppressed the truth throughout their corporation, which included a multitude of companies such as Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, Comedy Central, Miramax, Paramount Pictures and the Smithsonian Channel. Consequently, CBS and the corrupt fifty-one intelligence officials caused almost all U.S. legacy news media companies to fall into lockstep in denying the truth.
The Hunter Biden laptop cover-up was so suppressed within CBS that “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl explained to then-President Trump on October 26, 2020 that the laptop “’couldn’t be verified’,” which was a total lie. However, it was not until after the 2022 midterm elections in the wrong anticipation of a huge “red wave,” that CBS finally released Herridge’s report.
In the future, I will no longer be watching the CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell. Plus, she will be replaced in the near future by John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois. I truly am thankful that the New York Post had the courage to print Herridge’s investigative reporting on November 4 that no other national mainstream newspapers would dare print or any national networks would dare broadcast.
If the journalistic truth had come to light in October 2020, the Biden crime family would have been truly exposed, and President Trump most likely would have become the 46th president of the U.S.
Editor’s Note: But perhaps the 4 year interim will have serendipitously allowed Trump to have a much greater effect in turning the country around than he otherwise would have. Proving the old adage that, “Truth has a way of standing on its own . . .”
- Robert L. Maronic