It's the Women, Not the Men!

Sharyl Attkisson, 53 – Former Investigative Correspondent for CBS News Washington, DC Bureau

Sharyl Attkisson worked for CBS for more than twenty years. Prior to this job, she worked for CNN. She is the recipient of 5 Emmy Awards for her investigative reporting. Ms. Attkisson also helped CBS Evening News win the coveted Edward R. Murrow award in 2012.

By comparison, Ms. Attkisson was lauded, and encouraged, by her employer as she sought to investigate the foibles of the Bush Administration. And yet, having been assigned to investigate various scandals in connection with the Obama Administration, she found herself repeatedly hamstrung by her employer as she pursued these varying assignments.

Midway through Ms. Attkisson’s 2011 investigation into the details surrounding the “Fast and Furious” scandal, which included the death of an American Border Patrol officer, she was suddenly told, without explanation, to discontinue her efforts. She said that her employers didn’t even ask her what remained to be reported of her, half-told, story. She said, “I felt as though we had barely begun to scratch the surface” when they pulled the plug on her investigation.

In 2012, while investigating the attack on the U. S Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, which left 4 men dead, including the U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Ms. Attkisson found that her employers had “lost interest” in the story before she had any real answers. This time she voiced her objections to the cessation of her assignment. And, as a result of this complaint, CBS execs inexplicably labeled her a “troublemaker.”

Despite this bone of contention between she and her employer, Ms. Attkisson was asked in 2013 to report on the botched rollout of Obamacare. While investigating the story, Attkisson discovered “security issues, the lack of transparency, the lack of providing of figures and information that I think belonged in the public domain, belonged to us, that were being withheld.”

Then, just as with “Fast and Furious” and the Benghazi scandals, soon after she had just begun to discover the truth behind this newest scandal, she was once again asked to stop her investigation. And, once again, she protested this decision.  But her complaints fell on deaf ears.

Ms. Attkisson began to find it more difficult to get her investigations aired and became suspicious that anything that reflected negatively on the Obama Administration was being deliberately squelched by CBS. This led her to come to the conclusion that there was liberal bias at play, at the highest levels of CBS.

Interestingly, Bernie Goldberg, who had been a correspondent for CBS News for 28 years, quit in 2000 to write his best-selling book, Bias. His topic? the very same liberal bias at CBS with which Attkission was only now experiencing. Obviously, nothing had changed at CBS since Goldberg’s book was published.

In a state of chronic frustration, Ms. Attkisson finally approached CBS News President David Rhodes, in April of 2013, to request the termination of her contract. After months of negotiations, her resignation was finally announced in March of 2014.

Ms. Attkisson has since concluded that CBS was being pressured by the Obama Administration to ignore the scurrilous facts surrounding each, and every one, of the administration’s notorious scandals. She is now writing a book about her experiences at CBS titled, “Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington.” It will be available for purchase in November.

For a woman who spent her entire career working for liberal news organizations, Ms. Attkisson’s decision to quit, while protesting the rampant liberal bias displayed by CBS, is to be admired. It appears that she could no longer, in good conscience, ignore the truth. This is truly an admirable woman. We wish her every success with her upcoming book’s publication and hope that she does not regret wasting her life in service to the ungrateful corporate entity, known as CBS News.