Ethics Flashback: Remember When Gayle King Went Yachting With the Obamas?

April 24th, 2021 12:38 PM

Ethics. Objectivity. These things are not high priorities for CBS. One continuing example of that is Gayle King, a Democratic donor and cheerleader for her preferred political party. The fact that she co-hosts CBS This Morning and interviews powerful politicians, as well as reports on politics, doesn’t seem like a problem for the network. Four years ago this week that fact came into view, yet again. It turns out that King had been vacationing with the Obamas.

See the image at above right of the three on Hollywood producer David Geffen’s yacht.

CBS had no comment on the “ethical quandaries” of King vacationing with the Democratic power couple. When finally asked about it on April 21, 2017 by Access Hollywood, the co-host ridiculously insisted, “My vacations are not political and so I went on vacation with a great group of people and, to me, that's not a political statement.”

 

 

King’s connections to Democrats hardly end there. In August of 2020, I broke down her many links to the Democratic Party for a special report we called "Facts Feared by Leftist Media: Gayle King’s History Of Dem Donations and Vacations With the Obamas.

Gayle King has given exclusively to Democrats. According to Open Secrets, she donated over $33,000 to the DNC, $7300 to Barack Obama, $1000 to Democrat Harold Ford Jr. Open Secrets reports that the donations stopped in 2011 as she began at CBS. But the fact that she hasn’t given anything to Republicans shows that she’s a partisan leftist.    

King is good friends with former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker. As The Washington Free Beacon reported in 2019, sometimes the host disclosed this fact, but sometimes she didn’t. In May and February of 2019, she did.

King is best friends with talk show star Winfrey and has a tangled web of conflicting interests. She openly lobbied her liberal friend to run against Republican Donald Trump. Asked about it on the February 15, 2018 CBS This Morning, the host showed no conflict about her role as a journalist vs. her friendship: Discussing whether she was lobbying Winfrey, King responded, “Yes, I have. My name is Gayle, G-A-Y-L-E. Yes, I have.”

On October 31, 2018, King told the New York Times she had a “fantasy of covering” Winfrey's presidential bid against Trump. On March 8, 2018, King absurdly said she could be “impartial” on a Winfrey 2020 bid. On the same program, however, the CBS host pleaded for her friend to run: “But I also think you have a unique ability in terms of healing and connecting all people.”

For more examples from our FLASHBACK series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.