The White House seemed to reward CBS News for its new pro-Trump stance by allowing it to break the news of the U.S. attack on Venezuela, hours before any official statement.
CBS News’ big exclusive comes as its new MAGA-curious boss and Trump-aligned owners has been realigning its posture in ways that have alarmed some staffers and delighted Trump-world—and hours after declaring on Friday, “We love America,” and calling the U.S. “the last best hope on Earth.”
In the early hours of Saturday, the Trump administration launched bomb strikes on the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. No official news of the attack appeared until after 4 a.m. ET, in a Trump statement on Truth Social—around two-and-a-half hours after CBS News had broken the news.
Trump claimed the U.S. had “captured” the country’s President Nicolás Maduro.
At 2.05 a.m. ET, CBS News’ senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs posted on X that “Trump administration officials” had been “aware of reports of explosions and aircraft over Venezuela’s capital Caracas.”
Less than 30 minutes later, at 2.31 a.m. ET, she and the network’s national security editor, Jim LaPorta, revealed on X that Donald Trump had “ordered strikes on sites inside Venezuela including military facilities,” citing U.S. officials. They said this was “the administration ratchet[ing] up its campaign against the regime of President Nicolás Maduro.”
At around the same time, the station also launched a running live blog reporting the developments, framing the action as a White House-directed operation, not a mystery blast. The channel also broadcast a “special report,” showing what it described as explosions and low-flying aircraft over the capital. In discussions with the host, reporters told viewers that Trump had given the “green light” for the strikes.
Trump didn’t formally claim responsibility until 4:21 a.m. ET—when he wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. had carried out a “large scale strike” and that Maduro, 63, and his wife Cilia Flores, 69, had been “captured and flown out of the Country,” with a promised 11 a.m. press conference at Mar-a-Lago. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth followed suit soon after, reposting Trump’s statement.
On CBS News, Jacobs continued to drop exclusive stories about the attack, including reporting sources as telling her that Maduro was seized by Delta Force, and giving exact locations of the strikes.
In the fall, Paramount Skydance installed Bari Weiss, 41, as CBS News editor-in-chief after acquiring her outlet The Free Press in a $150 million cash-and-stock deal—putting a high-profile “anti-woke” media figure in charge of the network’s news division.
She frustrated many viewers, but pleased MAGA, with a softball interview of murdered conservative pundit Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, in December. Weiss then provoked a newsroom storm when she spiked a 60 Minutes segment that was unfavorable to Trump, a move staffers characterized as political.
The organization is now openly embracing patriotism as a guiding newsroom value. Ahead of Tony Dokoupil’s debut as presenter of CBS Evening News, it issued five principles, including: “We love America. And we make no apologies for saying so.”
The statement links that to “liberty, equality and the rule of law,” calls the country the “last best hope on Earth,” and frames the broadcast as a daily conversation about “where we are as a country and where we are going,” invoking Benjamin Franklin’s line about a republic—“if we can keep it.” Critics have said the language fits CBS’s rightward reset under Weiss and its new leadership.
Weiss was a former junior Wall Street Journal opinion editor who went to the New York Times, but quit, complaining it was “woke,” and set up her own MAGA-curious Substack, The Free Press. She was brought to run CBS News in by David Ellison, the billionaire nepo-baby who bought CBS with cash from his father, Trump-aligned Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
She has now installed Tony Dokoupil, a morning show co-host and former Daily Beast reporter, as CBS Evening News anchor, making him a successor to Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. He previewed his approach in a two and a half minute video railing against “elites”—he and Weiss were, however, both educated at expensive private high schools and Columbia University—and mentioning MAGA dog-whistles including Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s laptop. He was also sent to Grand Central Station in New York for an awkward video in which he asked people who he was and how to say his name. One woman asked, “Are you running for office, or something.”
The strikes in Venezuela follow months of U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean. The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford has been dispatched to the area, as part of a broader campaign that has included tanker seizures and deadly interventions at sea.
Maduro’s government has declared an emergency and urged supporters to take to the streets, while U.S. lawmakers from both parties have questioned the legal basis for the action.
The Daily Beast has contacted CBS News. The White House declined to answer if it had given the scoop to CBS News.
