CBS News is facing left-wing criticism after embattled “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan confronted the Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, about his claim that President Trump is trying to “rig” the midterm elections. Ms. Brennan is being accused of seeking to curry favor with CBS’s new owners, the Ellison family, who have pledged that the Tiffany Network will air fair news coverage.She has frequently been criticized by conservatives for badgering Republican guests with aggressive, slanted questions, and for selectively editing pre-taped interviews to make her conservative guests sound bad or to remove remarks objectionable to CBS News, such as Kristi Noem’s criticism of the character of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Ms. Brennan was also denounced for fact-checking JD Vance during the 2024 vice presidential debate after agreeing not to — and not fact-checking Tim Walz.Now she is facing liberal outrage after she grilled Mr. Jeffries on his claim that President Trump is “trying to rig the midterm elections.”“You said, ‘Democrats — there are no election deniers on our side of the aisle,’” Ms. Brennan said on Sunday. “Recently, you’ve been using the term ‘rigged elections’ in reference to the upcoming midterms. Democrats were appalled when President Trump used language like that. How do you justify using that now? Doesn’t that undermine faith for voters you need to show up?”Mr. Jeffries defended his comment, as he said he is “using that term in the context of Donald Trump’s unprecedented effort to gerrymander congressional maps in a partisan fashion all across the country in order to rig the midterm elections.”Ms. Brennan interrupted to point out that Democratic state lawmakers are “also going through gerrymandering and redistricting.” The minority leader responded by stating that Democrats are “going to push back aggressively to make sure that we have fair maps across the country.”Ms. Brennan’s line of questioning led liberal viewers to accuse her of changing her tune to placate the Ellisons, who have installed Bari Weiss, the pro-Israel founder of the Free Press, as editor in chief of CBS News. Media and political observers are now closely watching CBS News, which has been accused of a pervasive liberal bias for at least the last 50 years.A liberal commentator, Kaivan Shroff, shared the clip on X and wrote, “Scary. After Bari Weiss’s takeover of CBS, Margaret Brennan sounds like a Newsmax host in this interview with Hakeem Jeffries.”“It would be nice to have political show hosts who actually understood what was happening in our politics,” a left-wing writer, Hemant Mehta, said on X. A left-wing user, Jay Howser, said, “Dems should just boycott if @margbrennan [is] gonna be such a fraud of a journalist. This is bananas.”A far-left ex-MSNBC star, Keith Olbermann, said, “Really shameful from @margbrennan Never talked like that to any MAGA liars she’s platformed but happy to do it to Jeffries in an attempt to get Bari Weiss to NOT fire her. Just vacuous and amoral.”A former Biden aide, TJ Ducklo, wrote that the interview was “humiliating.”In addition to the contretemps over the Noem interview (which took place when she was off — the edit was made by her producers), Ms. Brennan came under fire last year after she was accused of selectively editing a pre-taped interview with Speaker Mike Johnson in which they removed his comments criticizing President Biden’s response to Hurricane Helene. Earlier this year, Ms. Brennan faced calls for her firing after she claimed that the Nazis weaponized free speech while she criticized Mr. Vance’s comment about European laws restricting speech. In August, Secretary Marco Rubio accused her of spreading a “stupid media narrative” when she asked about “concerns” that Mr. Trump would try to bully President Volodymyr Zelensky into making a bad deal to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ms. Brennan’s questioning of Mr. Jeffries comes as CBS News’s new owner, David Ellison, has made written commitments to fair journalism and has signaled that he wants to purge the network of what he feels is a left-wing and anti-Israel bias. Mr. Ellison is the son of the world’s second-richest man and a strong Trump supporter, Larry Ellison, who helped bankroll the acquisition of CBS and its corporate parent, Paramount. In August, David Ellison told reporters that he has members of his family who are Democrats and Republicans and said he wanted to make CBS into an outlet that both parts of his family feel they can watch. Since taking control of CBS, Mr. Ellison’s new management team has made a variety of changes meant to address complaints about its editorial slant. In September, the network announced that it would no longer edit pre-recorded interviews on “Face the Nation.”The network also hired Kenneth Weinstein, a former president of a conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute, to serve as its ombudsman to review complaints of bias at the network and report them to the president of Paramount.Mr. Ellison also paid $150 million for the anti-woke, pro-Israel outlet the Free Press and installed its founder, Bari Weiss, as the network’s new editor in chief. CBS News did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment.
