Former CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge claims that her efforts to report on Hunter Biden’s laptop were stymied by SOME at the network.
In a video posted to Twitter/X on Tuesday, she explained that while her top bosses WANTED her to cover the laptop story, lower-level employees who were still her superiors seemingly didn’t.
She said specifically that CBS CEO George Cheeks told her “multiple” times that he wanted her to look into the laptop on behalf of CBS parent company Paramount Global shareholder Shari Redstone.
“George Cheeks said to me on multiple occasions that this was a story of the highest priority for the network and that it was a high priority for his boss, Shari Redstone,” she explained. “So I took on that assignment and I did it to the best of my ability.”
EXCLUSIVE: The Untold Story Of The Hunter Biden Reporting At CBS, “I wanted the cleanest copy of the laptop data, the same data that was provided to the FBI…”
The full +22 minute video goes in depth on the controversy surrounding my investigation starting in October 2020.… pic.twitter.com/58stp0oNXi
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) November 26, 2024
According to Herridge, Cheeks told her CBS News wanted to “have accountability” on the issue and to “speak truth to power on both sides of the aisle.”
The problem was that there were others at CBS News who vehemently disagreed with this approach.
“There were corners of support in the company for it and there were corners of support who understood the value of investigating the Hunter Biden story, but there were some elements within CBS News that were just resistant to it,” Herridge said. “It didn’t matter what the facts of the case really were, and this bothered me as a journalist a lot.”
“I didn’t understand how a senior executive like George Cheeks could tell me that this was a high priority for the network and for his boss, and yet the executives at CBS News showed producers anchors could refuse that. I came to the conclusion that they must have felt that they were more powerful than George Cheeks, which was astonishing to me. I’d never worked at a place where a directive from the top would be so defied,” she added.
Her two biggest obstacles to covering the Hunter Biden laptop story were CBS News Washington Bureau Chief Mark Lima and CBS News President Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews.
Herridge noted that at one point she brought evidence to Ciprian-Matthews that the laptop contained emails about “a million-dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm” and damning text messages from Hunter himself, but the story was turned down.
Not until AFTER the 2022 midterm elections — over two years since the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story — did CBS News finally broadcast a forensic review of the laptop.
“When we did the story, we did it after the midterms,” Herridge said. “I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms and my training is that you should always do the story when it’s ready to go. You should not be dictated by the political cycle.”
After the story finally aired, Herridge continued proposing additional laptop-related stories but was again stymied in her efforts.
“For example, in the [Hunter Biden] text messages, there’s, unfortunately, the use of the N-word, the liberal use of the N-word, and I thought this was worthy of a story, but I was told that it was not something that interested CBS News,” she explained.
Obama outraged by Hunter Biden’s n-word text messages. Oh, wait … nope. https://t.co/esPpQ4YEYY pic.twitter.com/2iCIBN4bY8
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) June 10, 2021
She also discovered that the laptop contained “more than half a dozen emails that were likely used by Joe Biden.”
“I thought that was a story, but the answer that came back was, ‘Well, we need to know what the content is of the emails,'” she continued. “But that was going to be a years-long process, so there was no way. There were a lot of reasons I was told not to do it, not to pursue it.”
Herridge was eventually laid off from CBS News exactly a day after she reported on the devastating findings of then-special Robert Hur’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
“I reported the facts of that investigation that it was highly critical of the president, that it described him as a nice old man with a bad memory, and that he couldn’t be prosecuted for that reason among others,” she recalled.
“So I found the timing of that pretty significant on top of the fact that I was given an assignment that was very difficult internally, but I was fully committed to, and I did everything I could to put CBS first on a story that was not popular among a lot of people in that network,” she added.
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