Longtime CBS Evening News anchor and common 60 Minutes contributor Dan Rather doesn’t like what he sees taking place at — and to — his outdated employer.
Before David Ellison purchased Paramount Global and merged it along with his Skydance (forming Paramount Skydance), there have been “several instances in which the previous owners … tried to sort of dictate what kind of news comes on — even on 60 Minutes,” Rather advised Andy Cohen on Cohen’s SiriusXM radio show.
Inside of CBS News, 60 Minutes is taken into account a sacred car for journalism. Or fairly, it was thought-about that.
But then Shari Redstone, who beforehand managed Paramount by her household’s National Amusements, started to use strain to the editorial slant inside CBS News and its famed newsmagazine program. Basically, this system wanted to again off Trump (and the community needed to settle a lawsuit with him). In protest, Bill Owens resigned as government producer of 60 Minutes, and Wendy McMahon exited as head of CBS News.
The Ellisons, each David and his Oracle CEO father Larry, who helped finance the $8 billion Skydance-Paramount merger, like Redstone, have proven assist for Trump previously; each events wanted the president to make the merger undergo.
“It is a particularly tough time for anybody working at CBS News,” Rather stated. “I still know many people there, and I’m not ashamed to say that my heart is still there and probably always will be in a way, but this is an extremely tough time for them, and it’ll be interesting to see how much, if any, pressure the new owners put on them to change the coverage to be more pro-Trump than to being independent news.”
Rather continued that he doesn’t wish to be “unfair to the Ellisons,” however then he issued this warning: “I think if they were to buy NCS, it would change NCS forever and it might be another very serious wound to CBS News.”
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that David Ellison and his billionaire dad are preparing a bid for all of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns NCS.
“I do think … without preaching about it, but that we, all of us, all the Americans, have to be concerned about the consolidation of huge billionaires getting control of nearly all of the major news outlets,” Rather stated. “This is not healthy for the country, and it is something to worry about. … It’s pretty hard to be optimistic about the possibilities of the Ellisons buying NCS.”
Rather left CBS Evening News in 2005 amid an argument surrounding his reportage of unauthenticated paperwork about George W. Bush’s Vietnam War-time service within the National Guard. He was let go from CBS the next yr.