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 the Tiffany Network — namely, media heiress Shari Redstone and CBS CEO George Cheeks.
Herridge posted an explosive video on X Tuesday that revealed that Cheeks told her “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 whether 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.”
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…”
— Catherine Herridge (@C__Herridge) November 26, 2024
The full +22 minute video goes in depth on the controversy surrounding my investigation starting in October 2020.… pic.twitter.com/58stp0oNXi
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.
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 on 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.
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