Stephen Colbert Eviscerates His Network CBS For Hiring Trump's 'Craven Toady'
Stephen Colbert gleefully bit the hand that pays him on “The Late Show” Thursday.
The host slammed his network, CBS, for hiring former Donald Trump official Mick Mulvaney as a contributor in its news division. (Watch the video below.)
“What the fuck?” he exclaimed, though the last word was bleeped out.
Colbert explained Mulvaney’s shoddy history as Trump’s “craven toady” while serving as the former president’s acting chief of staff. Mulvaney admitted that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for political dirt (then tried to walk it back), dismissed the emerging COVID-19 crisis as a media plot to take down Trump and promised that if Trump lost the 2020 election, he’d concede gracefully. “He’s Nostra-dumbass!” Colbert cracked of the far-right Mulvaney.
“Why would the Tiffany Network’s venerable news division put this craven toady to a tyrant on their payroll?” Colbert asked.
In an apparent disclaimer to appease the network brass, Colbert said he was joking. But that’s what comedians do ― use humor to comment on serious issues.
Mulvaney’s new gig seemed to be preordained in an an earlier speech to staffers by CBS News President Neeraj Khemlani. In a recording obtained by The Washington Post, he said the Republicans would likely “take over” in the midterm elections, and that the network required more perspective from their side of the aisle.
“They’re not just reporting the news anymore, they’re predicting it now,” Colbert jabbed at his network.
Fast-forward to the 8:20 mark.
A CBS News exec said the network is hiring more Republicans because 'we know' they'll take over after the midterms: report
The Washington Post obtained a recording of a meeting with the CBS News copresident Neeraj Khemlani.
He said a "likely" Democratic wipeout in the midterms meant CBS needed to hire more Republicans.
CBS recently hired Mick Mulvaney, a former Trump aide who's been accused of pushing misinformation.
A CBS News executive told staff earlier this month that the network was hiring more Republicans as analysts because he believed there would "likely" be a Democratic wipeout in the 2022 midterm elections, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a leaked recording it obtained.
Neeraj Khemlani, a CBS News copresident, made the remark just before the announcement that the network had hired Mick Mulvaney, who briefly served as President Donald Trump's chief of staff, as an analyst. The decision sparked internal backlash, The Post reported.
In February 2020, Mulvaney accused journalists of exaggerating the impact of the coronavirus to damage Trump. Mulvaney also played a key role in the campaign to pressure Ukraine to smear Joe Biden, which resulted in Trump's first impeachment.
In an apparent attempt to lay the groundwork for the announcement of Mulvaney's hiring, Khemlani told morning-show staff members that hiring Republicans would give the network better coverage, The Post reported.
"If you look at some of the people that we've been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms," Khemlani said, according to The Post.
"A lot of the people that we're bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation."
Political analysts widely expect the Republican Party to make significant gains in the midterms. A recent NBC News poll suggested that Biden's approval rating was sagging because of inflation and other economic issues.
If a "red wave" of Republican victories materializes, Democrats could lose control of the House and the Senate, stymieing Biden's plans for issues ranging from the environment to voting rights.
Relations between the media and the White House were at historic lows during Trump's term, with top officials frequently railing against the press and picking fights with individual reporters.
Many news outlets accused Trump and senior officials of spreading falsehoods and misinformation on issues including the COVID-19 pandemic and voter fraud.
Several former Trump officials have gone on to be employed as analysts on conservative-leaning networks including Fox News and Newsmax, though few have found regular gigs on mainstream networks.
CBS facing backlash from staff after hiring ex-Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as pundit, report says
Johanna Chisholm
Thu, March 31, 2022
Staff from within CBS News are expressing their dismay at the company’s decision to hire ex-Donald Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as a pundit for the network, the Washington Post reported.
On Tuesday, the company announced that the former Trump aide, who was notorious for spreading falsehoods and bashing the very press he’s now joining as an on-air contributor, would be a welcome addition to the network for the varied experience he would bring from within the White House (he’s served as both Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and chief of staff).
Notably missing from Mr Mulvaney’s first introduction on CBS, however, was that important context.
“So happy to have you here … you’re the guy to ask about this,” anchor Anne-Marie Green said, introducing Mr Mulvaney as a “former Office of Management and Budget director”, but failing to mention under which administration.
The Washington Post reported that an emailed message from the standards department at CBS was later circulated to staff, without explicitly referencing that morning’s segment, to remind staff that “as we introduce these folks, we must always identify relevant background and biographical information,” including the specific administration a person worked for as a necessary disclosure.
The Post went on to report that, according to a recording obtained of CBS News’ co-president Neeraj Khemlani addressing staff about the new hire, the decision to bring Mr Mulvaney into the CBS family was part of a larger strategy to bring in people who can help with “access” to otherwise untapped parts of the political spectrum.
“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” the network’s co-president said, according to the Post’s reporting.
“A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
It’s not uncommon for administration officials to go on to cushy contributor jobs, oftentimes raking in annual six-figure salaries. But the particular gripe that has put some CBS staff, and many political journalists online, at unease is the record of truth-telling that Mr Mulvaney exhibited during his tenure in the Trump administration, and has much less to do with the fact that he worked under the previous president.
One anonymous source who works at CBS News told the Post that: “everyone I talked to today was embarrassed about the hiring”, while another staff member, who also asked the news outlet for anonymity because they were unauthorised to comment on the matter, said “everyone is baffled”.
The ire that’s being drawn up by Mr Mulvaney’s hiring stems from his track record both with the press and with the truth.
Poynter Institute’s Politifact, a nonprofit group of fact-checking journalists who have won a Pulitzer Prize for their work probing political claims made during the 2008 presidential election, ranks Mr Mulvaney’s scorecard as mostly false, false and at best, half-true.
In February 2020, while acting White House chief of staff, Mr Mulvaney attended the Conservative Political Action Conference and, while a deadly and then unknown virus was spreading across the globe and beginning to take hold in the US, he falsely claimed the “attention” then nascent pandemic was receiving was the press’ fault.
“They think this is going to be what brings down the president,” he told a room full of conservatives. “We know how to handle this.”
And in 2017, when acting as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, he went to the White House lectern and defended a Trump administration decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine for political purposes.
Column: Here are all the reasons CBS should never have hired Trump aide Mick Mulvaney for its newscast
Michael Hiltzik
Thu, March 31, 2022
Then-Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney at a press briefing in 2019. (Michael Reynolds /EPA-EFE/REX )
Staff members at CBS News are in an uproar over the venerable news department's hiring of former Trump White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney as a news commentator.
Their indignation is understandable and proper. Mulvaney, a long-time Republican functionary, distinguished himself during his tenure in the administration as a loyal Trump lackey.
He showed a micron-deep understanding of political and economic issues even when he served as Trump's budget director and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
If he loses, Trump will bow out gracefully.Mick Mulvaney, the new political commentator for CBS, showing how well he knew Trump in 2020
But he displayed a bottomless capacity to promote Trump's political goals, which boiled down the evisceration of federal programs aimed at helping the average American.
We'll get into the details in a moment. But first, let's examine the explanation that CBS brass offered to the network's news staff when they questioned Mulvaney's hiring.
“Being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani told staff members, according to the Washington Post's Paul Farhi, who was working from a bootlegged recording of the meeting. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
This is, of course, absurd. CBS is perfectly entitled to hire as many lobbyists as it wishes to make its case on Capitol Hill; putting them on the air, in essence to lobby the public, is another matter entirely. One question it raises is what value Mulvaney brings to the table. He's hardly a neutral voice, but if he's on the air merely to present his partisan slant, who needs him? Don't we get enough of that from elected politicians?
To be fair, CBS isn't the only news organization trying to curry favor in this way. In the old days, political types offering nothing but spin would be thrown out of the press room; now they're given a well-paid sinecure to provide "balance."
What Khemlani doesn't appreciate — or maybe he does and doesn't care — is that the quest for "access" has become the scourge of American journalism.
It's what produces puff pieces about political insiders (they're known in the trade as "beat sweeteners") and softball questions for politicians on the Sunday TV news programs.
TV news has become expert at taking people at their own level of self-esteem. What that fails to produce, however, is incisive news coverage of the sort crucial to the workings of our democracy.
So here comes Mick Mulvaney, introduced for his first appearance as a CBS commentator by anchor Anne-Marie Green to deliver his opinion of President Biden's proposed billionaires income tax.
“So happy to have you here,” Green fawned. “You’re the guy to ask about this.” The burden of her introduction was that Mulvaney was a Man Who Knows, but with his first words he acknowledged that he didn't know anything more about the billionaires tax than was embodied in Biden's own proposal; beyond that, his analysis was largely dismissive and, more to the point, indistinguishable from what one might hear from any GOP politician. (Mulvaney served as a Republican congressman from South Carolina from 2011 to 2017.)
Now let's take a closer look at Mulvaney's qualifications to opine about public issues. He was always someone who never let facts get in the way of partisan goals.
Start with his appearance in March 2017 on the CBS Sunday program "Face the Nation," when he was director of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump's White House. As I reported at the time, Mulvaney took the opportunity to deliver a drive-by shooting of some the nation’s neediest and most defenseless people: the disabled.
"Let me ask you a question,” he said to the moderator, John Dickerson, at the close of a seven-minute interview. “Do you really think that Social Security disability insurance is part of what people think of when they think of Social Security? I don’t think so. It’s the fastest-growing program. It grew tremendously under President Obama. It’s a very wasteful program, and we want to try and fix that.”
Dickerson's response to this volley of lies and disinformation, in its entirety, was: "OK, we’re going to have to end it there.”
Far be it from Dickerson to challenge someone who might be useful for providing "access."
If he were prepared to interview Mulvaney over matters of substance, however, he might have pointed out that, first, the disability insurance program has been part of Social Security since 1956, when it was signed into law by Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican president. He might have pointed out that Social Security is structured as both a retirement and an insurance program and has been since its enactment in 1935.
Dickerson might even have pointed out that Mulvaney was wrong to say disability was the “fastest-growing program." At the time, the disability rolls were not only not growing, but shrinking, and had been for more than two years. (The trend has continued up to the present day.)
Not only was the program not "wasteful," it had one of the lowest error rates of any government program — well below 1% of all benefits, as then-Acting Social Security Commissioner Carolyn Colvin had testified to Congress in 2012.
Mulvaney showed his commitment to sound government administration after Trump named him acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2018.
As one of his first acts in office, he went to a convention of credit union executives and boasted: “I am the acting director of the CFPB, something that’s apparently keeping Elizabeth Warren up late at night, which doesn’t bother me at all.”
Warren, you see, had conceived of the CFPB before her election to the Senate from Massachusetts in 2012 and had been its major defender in Congress since its founding. She had raised hell over several steps Mulvaney's CFPB had suddenly taken to scrap regulatory initiatives against abusive payday lenders.
Among them was a regulation, five years in the making, aimed at preventing payday lenders and other profiteers from lending to customers who they knew would be unable to repay the loans, as well as running up fees on customers and engaging in other abuses.
Mulvney abruptly withdrew, without explanation, a federal lawsuit against four allegedly abusive installment lenders. And he closed an investigation into World Acceptance Corp., a payday lender in his home state of South Carolina that had been accused of abusive practices, but had contributed at least $4,500 to his congressional campaigns.
To Mulvaney, Warren's objections to this deliberate enfeeblement of his agency's authority were grist for a comedy turn, offered for the amusement of the very financial services executives he was supposed to regulate. He saw his role as head of a consumer protection agency as protecting not only consumers, but the lenders from whom consumers needed protection.
“We are there to help protect people who use credit cards,” he told the credit union executives. “We’re also there to help and protect the people who provide that credit."
As Trump's chief of staff, Mulvaney spent his time trying to polish Trump policies. One might expect a politician's chief of staff to try to make his boss look good, but the policies he was defending don't speak well of Mulvaney's character.
In February 2020, he appeared at the American Conservative Union's CPAC conference to assert that news coverage of the emerging COVID pandemic was nothing but an effort "to bring down the President. That's what it's all about." It's almost certain that the White House knew at the time that the pandemic was a serious threat to public health.
On Nov. 7, 2020, Mulvaney's name appeared above a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he assured readers, as the headline put it, "If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully." That was four days after the election, when it was already clear that Trump had lost. "I’m familiar with his manner and style and know a little about how he thinks," Mulvaney claimed, based on his 15 months in the Trump White House.
That's a claim that, to say the least, hasn't aged gracefully.
To bring Mulvaney's judgment into present-day context, he also defended Trump's attempt to strong-arm Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into investigating Joe Biden's son Hunter by implying he otherwise would withhold U.S. aid to the country.
Asked at a press conference whether Trump was proposing a "quid pro quo," Mulvaney answered, "We do that all the time with foreign policy." Trump would be impeached for this scheme.
Put it all together, and it suggests that there is good reason to put Mulvaney before the audience of CBS News.
CBS should put him on the air to explain why he lied about the coronavirus threat in 2020, and what made him think that Trump would bow out "gracefully" after losing the 2020 election.
And why he thought it acceptable to extort a friendly country for purely personal partisan ends. And why he viewed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a shield for lenders, not consumers.
That's an appearance I'd like to see. But for CBS, unfortunately for us, that would be an obstacle to "access."
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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