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Fired CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge accused her former editors of “defying orders” to probe into Hunter Biden’s laptop from their own bosses at Tiffany Network — namely, the media heiress Shari Redstone and CBS CEO George Cheeks.
Herridge posted an explosive video on X Tuesday which revealed that Cheeks told her on “multiple” times that he wanted her to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop scandal — a directive that came directly from Redstone, the controlling shareholder of CBS parent Paramount Global, who pressed that it was “high priority.”
“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. So I took on that assignment and I did it to the best of my ability,” she said.
Cheeks told her CBS wanted to “have accountability” on the issue and to “speak truth to power on both sides of the aisle,” which the investigative reporter welcomed.
But the journalist said there was pushback inside the left-leaning network over her probe into the laptop of the president’s son, and if its contents revealed corruption by President Biden.
“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.”
CBS did not respond to requests for comment.
Earlier this month, Herridge revealed in her recently-launched newsletter that her direct bosses, Washington bureau chief Mark Lima and CBS News President Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews pushed back on Herridge’s reporting, killing potential stories in the early days of the laptop scandal.
retainer from a Chinese energy firm, along with other texts and emails, but her report never aired.
In her bombshell allegation, Herridge said she brought evidence to Ciprian-Matthews and “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell in early October 2020 that the laptop contained material about “a million dollar retainer from a Chinese energy firm,” along with business texts and emails from the son of Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
But her reporting never aired.
The Post was the only mainstream publication to report at the time that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden — leading to a ban of the story by social media giants Facebook and Twitter.
It took an additional two years for CBS to broadcast a forensic review of the Hunter Biden laptop data. By that time, Ciprian-Matthews had been elevated to the role of CBS News president.
the importance of Herridge’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop
scandal. CBS via Getty Images
“When we did the story, we did it after the midterms. 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,” she said in Tuesday’s video. “You should not be dictated by the political cycle.”
After the piece aired, Herridge was pushed to continue reporting out what she had unearthed from the forensic review.
“For example, in the 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 said, noting that CBS didn’t do that story but they also passed on intel from the forensic review that revealed “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 said, explaining that that was going to be a “years-long process” to get that information and she was told not to pursue it, as a result.
As the award-winning journalist continued her pursuit of the laptop story, she said she was struck by a “disconnect” at the Tiffany Network.
“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,” she said.
“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,” Herridge said.
Earlier this year, Herridge was fired in a round of sweeping layoffs at CBS News-parent Paramount Global. The reporter said she was shocked to learn her head was on the chopping block, as she had consistently dug up scoops.
The investigative reporter said the timing raised eyebrows, noting that when she was terminated she looked in to the metadata of the one-sheet that her termination letter was created on Feb. 9, a day after Herridge covered special counsel Robert Her’s investigation and final report into President Biden.
“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. 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 said.
CBS News seized Herridge’s reporting materials upon her termination.
Sources close to the situation claimed that the decision to hold on to her files was made by Ciprian-Matthews. The network did not comment on the specifics.
The files were returned days later amid pressure from the union representing Herridge.
Earlier this year, The Post reported that Ciprian-Matthews was accused of sidelining white journalists and blocking Herridge’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop.
The exec abruptly stepped down in August, and moved to the role of senior adviser for coverage of the 2024 presidential election before. She is no longer at the network.
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