TV News LIES

Anderson Cooper is signing off after 20 years.

The CNN anchor, 58, bid farewell to "60 Minutes" on the newsmagazine show's May 17 episode, his last as a correspondent. After the season finale, which featured a report by Cooper about London's cab industry in the age of autonomous vehicles, CBS News released an extended farewell interview with the journalist.

Cooper grew emotional as he delivered his final "I'm Anderson Cooper." After choking up for several seconds and looking down as he held back tears, he looked straight into the camera and said the line three times, a standard for the show.

In the "overtime" segment, Cooper went down memory lane, recalling the "dangerous" and "dumb" things he's done for the show, such as diving with Nile crocodiles and being "temporarily" blinded after riding a jet ski over massive waves in Portugal.

Though a montage of recognizable faces showed Cooper's interviews with Prince Harry, Lady Gaga, and the late Donald Sutherland, Cooper seemed to fondly look back on impactful sit-down interviews with "compelling characters" who are not household names, such as a Holocaust survivor and people combating child malnutrition in Niger.

More...

CNN anchor Jake Tapper ripped President Trump’s attacks on the media as “deranged” on Friday after the president lashed out against what he views as “treasonous” coverage of the conflict with Iran.

“Reporting these facts isn’t treason, and it’s deranged for any president to say such a thing and potentially dangerous for the reporters he’s accusing of treason,” Tapper said during a segment on “The Lead.”

Trump scolded New York Times (NYT) reporter David Sanger earlier Friday as the longtime correspondent was pressing him about the U.S. military’s 38-day bombing campaign inside Iran.

Sanger wrote in a NYT report earlier this month that the U.S.’s core objectives in the war “clearly have not” been achieved, despite the Trump administration’s repeated assertions that they had. He noted that Tehran’s nuclear stockpile remained untouched, and the sides appeared no closer to a deal on constraining the program.

More...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) torched CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss on Thursday after reports surfaced that she allegedly let Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu select his interviewer for last weekend’s “60 Minutes” segment.

Speaking with reporters outside the Capitol, Ocasio-Cortez called into question Weiss’s journalistic integrity while saying she couldn’t think of any other foreign leader with this level of influence over American media.

“That CBS situation is just a violation, I think, of any journalistic standards,” Ocasio-Cortez told Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone. “So it doesn’t surprise me that Bari Weiss is letting elected officials, who should be held accountable by journalists and the free media, instead she’s doing things the other way around and letting her friends pick their interviewer.”

More...

The United States is moving to indict Raúl Castro, the former Cuban president, two sources familiar with the matter told USA TODAY.

The possible charges are related to a 30-year-old case that involved the Cuban government shooting down two planes operated by a humanitarian group in 1996, the people familiar said. The indictment would have to be approved by a grand jury.

News that the U.S. was looking to indict Castro came hours after CIA Director John Ratcliffe led a delegation to Havana on May 14 to deliver a message from President Donald Trump to Cuban officials and Raúl "Raulito" Guillermo Rodriguez Castro. Raulito is the elder Castro's grandson.

The potential indictment for former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, now 94, and the charges were first reported by CBS News.

The 1996 shootdown of two civilian planes operated by the exile group Brothers to the Rescue remains one of the most politically charged episodes in modern U.S.-Cuba relations – and one in which some U.S. officials are still pressing for criminal accountability three decades later.

More...

Jimmy Kimmel is making sure Stephen Colbert has the spotlight as CBS' "The Late Show" wraps.

The late-night comedian will show his respect for Colbert by not airing a new episode of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" on Thursday, May 21, the day of Colbert's final "Late Show," USA TODAY has learned.

The news was first reported by LateNighter. Kimmel told the outlet he isn't going on the air that night out of deference to Colbert. The comic is not otherwise on hiatus from "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" that week, as new episodes are still scheduled for May 18 through May 20 on ABC.

Kimmel made a similar decision in 2015, deciding not to air a new episode opposite David Letterman's final "Late Show" on CBS. "I have too much respect for Dave to do anything that would distract viewers from watching his final show," Kimmel told The New York Times. "Plus, I'll probably be crying all day, which makes it hard to work."

More...

Ukraine successfully conducted its 72nd prisoner exchange on Saturday, April 11, bringing home 182 citizens from Russian captivity just ahead of the Orthodox Easter holiday. The swap resulted in the release of 175 military personnel and seven civilians, according to the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the return of the defenders in a social media post, noting that the group includes warriors from the Armed Forces, National Guard, and Border Guard Service. “Most of them had been in captivity since 2022,” Zelensky stated. “Finally, they are home. It is a matter of principle for us to return everyone from Russian captivity.”

A major highlight of this exchange was the return of 25 officers, a group the Russian side had previously categorically refused to include in negotiations. More than half of the freed defenders were captured during the siege of Mariupol, while several National Guard members taken prisoner during the occupation of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) in the early days of the invasion were also released.

More...