Sharyl Attkisson exposes how CBS abandoned investigative journalism under Obama, suppressing stories like Fast and Furious while her Bush-era critiques faced no retaliation. She links the rise of "fake news" to 2016’s Google-backed First Draft and Media Matters’ biased fact-checking, which weaponized terms like "conspiracy" to silence dissent. Trump’s election intensified media bias, with outlets prioritizing ideological warfare over truth, while decentralized platforms offer a glimmer of hope—though Attkisson warns government speech regulation could worsen the crisis. Her work in Full Measure and books (Slanted, The Smear) reveals a system where propaganda, not facts, now dictates narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
Cheryl Atkinson is one of the truly terrific investigative reporters in the country.
She has now got a Sunday morning TV program called Full Measure with Cheryl Atkinson.
I have literally read all of her books, Stonewall the Smear, and I'm just about to finish Slanted, How the Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.
Cheryl, you there?
Yes, I am.
Thank you for having me.
Well, thanks so much for coming on.
You know, you I was just last night, I was reading an article about the death of journalism and post-journalism, and it was all keyed in to Donald Trump.
But your experience at CBS that caused you to leave CBS happened during the Obama administration.
So this has been something that's been happening a long time.
Can you explain why you left CBS after quite a long and successful tenure there?
I guess in retrospect, I was on the leading edge of this trend that I call the death of journalism as we knew it, where propaganda groups, third parties, corporate and political interests have figured out how to control information first by figuring out how to get their nose under the tent in news organizations.
And I didn't know exactly what was behind it always, but at CBS, I saw this great sea change where by the last couple of years I was there, it was almost impossible to get a fair, rational news story on that addressed really anything of importance.
And since I was an investigative reporter, there was nothing left for me to do.
And these weren't just political stories.
Most of my reporting is non-political, but pretty much tackle any powerful interest or anything that a powerful interest cares about.
And they had ways to stop these stories or water them down.
So, you know, I expand upon that a lot in the subsequent books that talk about how these groups work, who they are, and how they figured out how to control the news and then moved on, as I describe and slanted, to the internet because people were still able to get free, unfettered information on the internet.
And these powerful interests do not want that to happen.
You know, you talk about powerful interests, and you tell a number of stories of how corporations silenced stories that might have hurt their business.
But it's hard not to feel that there is a definitive leftist slant here.
I mean, you had written many stories exposing things in the George W. Bush administration, but when you started to write about Fast and Furious and other problems in the Obama administration, you ran into problems.
You talk about the narrative.
You say only things that fit the narrative are allowed in.
Is the narrative simply leftism or is there more to it than that?
Well, there's more to it, but I would say the left has gotten better at it.
There are more organized and well-funded groups with purpose that have gotten together and organized to do this, whether it's the fake fact check groups, the lobbying social media to crack down in a way that benefits them on information.
Whereas, pardon me, the conservatives or the Republican side haven't done as good a job, not that they probably wouldn't equally like to be able to change the information landscape in a way that benefits them, but they haven't been as good at it.
And if you consider that traditionally Republicans or conservatism talks more about sort of hands-off, they're probably going to be less in your face in the traditional controlling fashion when it comes to trying to make people think a certain way, more toward, at least they used to be, more toward the free thinking, make up your own mind.
So if you have the other side that believes in a heavy hand, who's going to win that battle?
So I think we're seeing that.
And it's not all political.
I mean, there are some very important left voices, such as Glenn Greenwald, who founded the Intercept and had to quit his own company because they censored his story on Hunter Biden.
There are traditional liberal thinkers who find this oppression of free information and speech to be as horrifying as anybody else.
And they're being subjected to it as well.
You know, it's not just suppression of information.
It is also disinformation.
Your second book, I think it is, called The Smear.
You talk about David Brock and Media Matters, who he comes after us all the time here at the Daily Wire.
They actually have a guy who does nothing but listen to us, poor man.
But you tell a story about Pizzagate and that Pizza Parliament and Pizzagate was run by a former lover of Brock's.
You kind of suggest, I mean, and tell me if I'm wrong about this, but it seemed to me that you suggested that Pizzagate, the idea that there was some kind of Hillary Clinton was running some kind of child molesting business out of this pizza parlor in D.C. You suggest that it might have been engineered by the left, not by the right, even though it was the right that bought into it.
Do you think that that's, is that a fair assessment of what you say?
Well, not exactly.
This is a complicated way of thinking I try to get people to think about.
And while we're at it, let me say hello to my Media Matters monitor because I don't know if it's the same guy or gal, but they're listening to me too, so they're doubling up.
We've got two listeners, yeah.
But, you know, what I'm trying to get people to understand, and I didn't know that whole conspiracy to be about Hillary Clinton personally, again, I didn't look too deeply into it, but some of it was said to be, you know, her top supporter, John Podesta, being involved and all kinds of things.
But what I wanted people to understand is there was a concerted effort that we have documented around this timeframe by left-leaning groups to crack down on information that they didn't like, you know, information online by conservatives, including true disinformation, but also this slow creep toward information that may be perfectly true or a matter of an opinion that they also don't like to be seen, but there was a way to kind of get their nose under the tent.
So all of this coincided in the same time.
And it's entirely possible, as I say, that this was a made-up hoax entirely.
But for reporters to claim to know that Pizzagate is untrue, they're sort of just buying into this spin in a way of defending something that they have no firsthand knowledge of.
Now, I don't believe personally, I have no evidence and don't believe children were being trafficked in the basement of a pizza restaurant.
But remember the way this all works when you're talking about disinformation, there can be a grain of truth in a story that then by the people who are alleged to be guilty of something, they can turn it into a bigger, crazy story that caused people to then dismiss everything, including the bit of truth about the story, if you're following me.
And that's happened.
I mean, I've talked to smear artists for my second book who talked about that strategy.
So you just have to think, I'm encouraging people to go beyond the obvious layers when you're looking at stories and information to consider other possibilities that I think a lot of the media people overlook.
Yeah, on this show, we call that Clavinon, which is the actual conspiracy underneath the conspiracy theory that is actually hiding it.
But you do talk about this kind of concerted effort to curate the news, that wonderful kind of mild word, curate the news, that David Brock has bragged about this, of installing left-wing curators at Facebook, I think.
You do kind of suggest, I mean, I know you can't prove this, but you suggest that this was a sort of unified effort during the Obama years.
Is that fair to say?
Well, yes.
I mean, I would say that's a bit more of a suggestion on my part, and I do have the evidence behind that.
I followed the money and traced the origins of the phrase fake news in its modern context and found that it arrived on the stage.
You know, people think that's been around forever.
People mistakenly think Donald Trump brought it up.
But it can be traced to about September of 2016 when a nonprofit called First Draft began talking for the first time about this notion that was foreign to us, at least on any wide scale at that point, of curating our news and fake news.
You know, people may not remember, nobody was asking for that, people to come in and curate our information.
They had to create a market for it, and they did.
So when this nonprofit started it, I looked into, you know, well, who started the nonprofit?
And guess who funded it?
Google, owned by Alphabet, whose CEO at the time was Eric Schmidt, big, big, big Hillary Clinton person.
And they're the ones who came up with the notion.
A short time later, as I trace in the book, President Obama gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon that talked for the first time that I heard about the need to curate our information in this wild, wild west media environment of the internet.
Again, public had not been demanding for any such thing.
Social media had not been inserting itself.
And from that day forward, almost every day, this began to make headlines, fake news.
And initially, as First Draft defined it, it was always conservative.
There was no liberal-leaning fake news as far as they were concerned.
And then that was followed by David Brock, as you mentioned, bragging to donors after the election that he and Media Matters was the entity that convinced Facebook to step in and start with these aggressive efforts for the first time to fact check, but of course, only certain organizations and topics and only using the certain people that will fact check a particular way.
So that movement is very, I think, very carefully borne out.
And that was in my last book, The Smear, if people are interested in reading a lot more about that.
Yeah.
And now in Slanted, you've gotten to the Trump administration.
And there can be no doubt that what started had been increasing for a long time just exploded during the Trump administration.
Trump, I think, whether you like him or not, it has nothing to do with that.
He was treated unfairly at a level I've never seen anybody treated at.
What did you see?
You've now left CBS.
You're doing your show full measure with Cheryl Atkinson.
You're looking at this.
What are you seeing?
I mean, what are you thinking to yourself as somebody who was actually an actual journalist when you saw the way Trump was treated?
You know, I've categorized and written a lot about the death of the news.
This is just not how journalism is conducted.
And when I saw major news organizations exempting themselves from journalism practices and suspending, very publicly suspending their normal ethics and standards because they said they needed to do that to fight a uniquely dangerous president.
I argued that's when your ethics and standards matter the most when you feel personally that you don't like somebody you're covering.
That's why the standards exist, not so that you're fair in covering someone you like.
It's so that you're fair in covering everybody.
And I found it as many other journalists who spoke to me, you know, quite surprisingly, national journalists and executives at all the networks spoke to me from my book Slanted.
Many of them are equally as horrified.
They just don't speak out about it and they can't if they're still actively working at these news organizations.
But this is just a horrible trend where the loud bullies and the propagandists are able to shout down those who still want to do good fair journalism.
And you see the repercussions for those who are off the narrative.
They're fired or canceled or drowned out in one form or another.
But I think the drive against Donald Trump was in large part spurred on by the fact that he got elected in 2016, even though almost all news entities and major media had told the public that he could not be elected and he was unfit.
And that caused the people that did not want both Republicans and Democrats, by the way, who did not want this outsider outside of their money links in the presidency.
That made them say, wow, we're controlling the news to a large degree, but people are still getting information we don't want them to have somewhere and forming their own conclusions.
And that was online.
And that's what I think has driven this, you know, attack on President Trump and the change in the media landscape, such a drastic change over the past four years.
You know, you mentioned the economics of this, and it makes me wonder how much of this is ideological and how much of it is money.
Maybe those two things are inseparable.
But for instance, in an old newspaper, you didn't want to chase anybody away, the left or the right.
You wanted your newspaper to sell to everybody so you could sell them the ads in the newspaper.
Now ads have all gone online.
Newspapers are not really living by ads.
They really need, in order to make people show up, they really need to basically play to a certain audience and make people angry and afraid and get them to keep coming back.
Is any of this about the economics of the business or is it really ideological and a question of influence?
Well, I think there's economics at play, but not so much on the macro level that you're describing, because this is what shocked me at CBS.
I saw them making decisions that were contrary to their financial interests, stopping the airing of segments that were extremely popular with viewers that they were coming to the network for, by all accounts.
They could measure that sort of thing.
They would stop those stories, and that's what led me to think there's something far beyond just this news division and how we're making a little bit of money or not.
And same with, you know, Google and Facebook and so on.
They're driving people away by their decisions.
But in the bigger picture, there are more important and more powerful people and interests that are causing them to do things that look to be in some instances against their own financial interests.
I think that's the tell.
You know, one of the things you talk about, the reason I like your book so much, by the way, is not just that you're an insider, but you see these things with an incredible clarity.
And one of the things you talk about in Slanted is the language of propaganda.
You give a bunch of examples of ways in which just the things that, just the words they use are slanted.
Can you give a couple of examples of that?
Because I think it's just really instructive to people to understand how simple this is.
Well, I went, let's start with the last book when I said phrases that popped up in news and, you know, kind of widespread in social media, which had not been so commonly used before.
Conspiracy, tinfoil hat, debunked, you know, phrases like that.
And then I move on to slanted when you see everybody saying, starting to do the word without evidence, the phrase, which had not been used before, but became part of the standard thing to disparage primarily President Trump or conservatives or his supporters.
You know, these are phrase, propaganda phrase picked up.
The word lies was never or very rarely used by mainstream media, let alone the likes of the New York Times prior to this time.
And then when they started using it against President Trump, they were actually cheered on by journalism professors, including one that wrote an op-ed that said this was a wonderful thing to have what he called the end of objective and objectivity and neutrality in journalism.
I mean, it sounds crazy when you just look at this double speak and think, you know, people are saying this is a good thing, but you can recognize this language.
And I think people do when they see uncommon terms suddenly being used by almost everybody being adopted into the lexicon of journalism, whether it's left or right, that's because someone has planted that and successfully made that part of the terms in which we describe things and how we talk.
Technical Solutions for Journalism00:02:54
Yeah.
Do you despair?
I mean, do you think that there's a way to bring journalism back?
I don't think it'll ever be what it used to be.
Not that it was ever perfect, but it was certainly more open and more diverse than it is now and more fact-based in general.
But I think there are good people working on alternatives that are going to rely on having different technical platforms so that people can report honestly and fairly, you know, different viewpoints and all kinds of facts without, in science, without fear of being pulled down and controversialized out of existence.
So there's a technical challenge that has to be met.
And then there are a lot of people that want to do that kind of reporting.
There's a lot of people that want to see that kind of reporting.
So that will just fall into place once we figure the technical part out.
Problem is now, you know, I feel like this information suppression is happening just with a whimper.
Where are the First Amendment law firms and groups that should be stepping up now saying we need to protect all kinds of viewpoint speech, facts, and science, even that which is objectionable as long as it's not illegal?
Instead, these very groups I find are in journalism groups sometimes are cheering it on because they like the people that are being oppressed.
They like that those viewpoints aren't being heard and can't seem to figure out or apply that this country was founded on the notion that you have to protect the speech you don't like as well as the speech you like because it's a slippery slope as to who gets to decide that sort of thing.
Once you start letting them enter into the equation, third parties, conflicted people, powerful interests and tell you what you can think and say and do, I don't know how you go back from that.
And I think that's a really important concern right now.
Yeah, you know, I think that one big problem is that conservatives have been pro-business for so long that they can't quite get their heads around the fact that these businesses have gotten out of control and are gutting constitutional rights.
I think, you know, I'm not saying government never has a solution, but I think that oftentimes the perfect solution doesn't come from government.
And I really wish there was a way for people to step back and say again, we all want open information except that which is illegal and not have the solution be born in Republicans or Democrats or anybody else coming in and kind of telling us what the solution should be because it's very hard to have, you know, someone do that in a way that's free of conflicts.
But letting it go isn't working either.
So I, you know, I'm not saying that things the way they are now should be left to their own devices.
I just am always concerned when government starts talking about stepping in with the answer.
Yeah.
Cheryl Atkinson, if you want to see some real journalism guys go to full measure with Cheryl Atkinson, her Sunday morning TV program, her books, Slanted, The Smear, and Stonewalled.