7/25: CBS Saturday Morning

The U.S. pauses strikes against Iran, LeBron signs with the Sixers, plus SpaceX's first post-IPO flight.

‘Like Graham Platner but worse’: GOP group vows $42,000,000 campaign against last-minute replacement Democrat

A Republican group has vowed to spend at least $42 million against the new nominee to be one of Maine’s Democratic senators, Troy Jackson, the Daily Caller […]

Ex–60 Minutes Journalist Exposes How Bari Weiss Tried to Help Trump

CBS News chief Bari Weiss has been so busy skewing the storied network’s coverage that she’s gotten basic facts wrong—including elementary details about America’s leaders and where they’re from.Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega spilled the tea at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference in New Orleans Thursday, revealing that she had endured network pressure on a number of issues before she was canned, including one particularly stunning dispute over a story on SNAP benefit cuts in West Virginia.While stopping short of referring to Weiss by name, Vega said her decision to tell the story strictly through the eyes of West Virginians had spurred backlash from CBS’s “new” top brass because she had not interviewed Vice President JD Vance or referred to his decade-old memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.But Vance, as Vega pointed out, is from Ohio. Not West Virginia.Other arguments bubbled up over the network’s new intent to insert political bias into the famed news magazine’s reporting, according to Vega. One such instance involved demands by network executives that she include footage of protesters attacking plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minnesota—footage that her team discovered did not exist. She said she was also tasked with inserting a line into one of her scripts that claimed Iran was “totally outgunned” by U.S. and Israeli forces—a detail that she noted was a copy-paste administration talking point.Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped to run CBS News late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast journalism, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.Weiss’s business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting and the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics. Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on Vega’s 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Donald Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT megaprison.The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from Vega to 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens and the program’s de facto face, Scott Pelley.

Morning Minute: No, Freddy — Thank You!

The Morning Briefing: Hell Hath No Idiocy Like White Libs Playing the Race Card

Morning news brief

U.S.-Iran strikes escalate, affecting global energy markets, Trump imposes double-digit tariffs on dozens of countries, Vigil held in Madison, Wisconsin, for man killed by police.

CBS News president ‘dead meat’ for dismal viewership as morning show notches worst-ever ratings

The morning show, anchored by Gayle King and Nate Burleson, averaged just under 1.6 million total viewers for the week, according to Nielsen figures.

The Morning Briefing: Rally Trump Is Still My Favorite Trump