If you wanted more evidence of the descent of CBS News into utterly pretentious piffle, look no further than CBS Evening News Plus, which indulges the ego of its anchor, John Dickerson, by enabling a “Reporter’s Notebook” editorial at the close of each telecast. Dickerson’s latest oeuvre: a diatribe blaming President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for ruining spring for him.
Watch Dickerson’s grandiloquent pomposity for yourselves, and drink it all in:
JOHN DICKERSON: The happiness report is here again. I'm not talking about the global rankings of happiness that was published today. I'm talking about spring, nature's happiness report, which also arrives today. It is the first day of spring where we are. A fact that might not be in evidence everywhere but will be soon enough. Spring is pushy. Water seeps up stalks, bulbs, crack; bird answers bird. You can't stop the march of green, the return of color. Persephone is on the front door stoop. Words come out of storage. You can't bask in a snowstorm. But you can bask in the sun, you can sprout, you can unfurl. It is nature's station alert. We interrupt this programming for a comeback tour. The season arrives with equal generosity for all, indifferent to our human boundaries and sorrow. Egalitarian renewal that comforts, but that also accuses. Accuses those whose avarice, callousness, or even our own comfort have made parts of the world so miserable. That they deprive those who toil, those who flee and those who endure of even a moment’s peace to experience this basic thing, the birth of spring. We are lucky, those of us who can feel spring as a tonic, but not all of us are lucky, which makes spring a thorn. If is it generous, maybe we should be more generous, too. And that’s tonight’s CBS Evening News Plus. I’m John Dickerson. Good night.
Dickerson’s editorial lulls viewers into the hopeful anticipation of a newscast closing with an unvarnished and unsullied evocation of the inevitable, unstoppable beauty of spring. Dickerson’s warm and fuzzy prose, a lyrical harbinger of the season to come.
Alas, that was not the case. The hopeful anticipation turned to bitter loathing as, at about 48 seconds in, Dickerson proceeds to shove Persephone off the front door stoop and bludgeon her all the way back to Hades. This, too, was ultimately a political screed.
Dickerson’s jabs at Musk, Trump, and America herself are veiled but easily visible. “Egalitarian renewal…that accuses” being the early tell and tonal shift, concealing his denunciations of DOGE, immigration, and foreign policy beneath florid prose that ends in a scold-like call for generosity.
When the time comes to perform an autopsy on whatever happened to CBS’s news division, this editorial will be at or near the top of the exhibit list. Lyrical and florid, like spring itself, but vomitous nonetheless.
