CBS bashed after rolling over for Trump's Pentagon: 'Democratic erosion on TV'

CBS News' decision to give three separate interviews to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the Pentagon essentially wiped out its press corps and replaced it with a group of far-right bloggers and Trump loyalists is indefensible, wrote Colby Hall in a scathing opinion piece for Mediaite — and it portends a further weakening of the independent press.

"Hegseth’s appearance on CBS Evening News followed the Trump administration’s move to sharply restrict access for credentialed Pentagon reporters, sidelining journalists responsible for independently scrutinizing U.S. military power," wrote Hall. "Yet CBS not only sat down with Hegseth, it allowed him to define a U.S. military operation in Venezuela as a 'law enforcement' action, argue Congress need not be notified, and openly discuss American oil interests, all without confronting the administration’s crackdown on the press itself."

The mere fact CBS didn't challenge Hegseth's "law enforcement" narrative is a serious problem in and of itself, Hall argued, because it seeks to put Trump's actions in Venezuela on a legal footing that Congress cannot properly scrutinize.

"This is not about whether CBS should have interviewed the Secretary of Defense," Hall continued. "It is about the terms under which the interview occurred. When an administration punishes reporters and dismantles a press corps, access no longer functions as a neutral journalistic transaction. Interviews conducted under those conditions carry an obligation to address the attack on the press itself. CBS did not meet that obligation."

Hall wrote that this is "what democratic erosion looks like on television."

"It unfolds in real time through polished interviews and familiar formats, when attacks on accountability infrastructure are treated as peripheral rather than central. It advances when institutions accommodate power that has already shown it will punish scrutiny, hoping compliance will preserve access."

All of this comes as CBS is newly headed by right-wing analyst Bari Weiss, who was installed to that position as part of a Trump administration-approved merger of CBS's parent company.

As soon as this happened, the network made a number of controversial moves, including replacing their handbook of journalistic ethics with a brief mission statement that included patriotism, and trying to pump the brakes on a story exposing the overseas torture of people subject to Trump's mass deportation programs.