Oh, CBS News. Oh, 60 Minutes. Once upon a time, you were the media’s apex predator—the saber-toothed, steel-balled, Nixon-mauling beast that made corporate titans and crooked politicians soil their designer slacks at the mere tick-tick-tick of your stopwatch.

. . .

Fast forward to last night, and what do we get? Not fearless journalism, but the sound of journalistic balls shriveling up and receding back into the corporate torso. And for what? For who? For Donald Trump—a man whose ego is matched only by his capacity for self-pity, stockpiling slights and vendettas like a doomsday prepper hoards canned beans—and his new bestie, Bari “I’m not a journalist, but I play one on Twitter” Weiss.

Let’s not bury the lede here: CBS, the Tiffany Network, the house that Murrow built, just killed—no, let’s say it correctly, murdered—a 60 Minutes exposé on Trump’s illegal, human-rights-violating, brown-people-shredding deportations to El Salvador. The story was vetted, checked, lawyered to hell and back, ready to go. But then, like a man angrily shaking a snow globe because the fantasy inside stopped responding, Trump threw a fit—still furious that 60 Minutes interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene without first kneeling for permission, because his ego is a raw nerve wrapped in barbed wire—and suddenly, poof, the story was gone. Vanished. Yanked hours before airtime like the Epstein prison camera that mysteriously malfunctioned at the exact, exquisitely convenient moment it was most needed.

. . .

This is one of the biggest scandals in the history of broadcast media. A fully vetted 60 Minutes investigation was pulled hours before airtime because a sitting president objected. That has no modern precedent. And everyone inside journalism knows it.

This wasn’t caution. It was obedience.

. . .