The Daily Caller reviewed the leadership teams for Paramount and CBS and only discovered one executive who recently donated to Republicans: Paul Wiser, the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Paramount. In the 2024 election cycle, Wiser made donations in support of the candidacies of Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, amounting to $520.50 and $100, respectively. He also made $250 in unspecified donations to WinRed, a popular Republican fundraising platform.
Justin Dini, executive vice president and head of communications of Paramount, appears to have donated at least $535 to Harris for President, $335 to the Harris Victory Fund, and $800 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as part of a longstanding recurring donation in the 2024 election cycle, according to FEC records.
Dini donated to Harris’s 2020 White House bid the day after her infamous debate moment where she implied Joe Biden supported racist policy and was too close with old racist colleagues in the Senate.
Other members of the CBS and Paramount leadership team made contributions to other Democratic campaigns. Claudine Milne, senior vice president of standards and practices for CBS News and Stations, donated $50 to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in September of 2020, records show. DeDe Lea, executive vice president of Paramount Global public policy and government relations, gave $5,000 to Democrat Angela Alsobrooks’s campaign for senate, $500 to Glenn Ivey’s run for congress and $500 to Joyce Beatty’s congressional bid in 2022, according to FEC records.
Neither of the debate moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, appear to have made any political donations.
CBS and Paramount did not respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment.
People watch the presidential debate during a debate watch party at Shaw’s Tavern on September 10, 2024 in Washington, DC. Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump face off in their first debate Tuesday evening at The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Bias in debate moderation was a major story when Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump faced off last Tuesday in what seems to be the last presidential debate of the election cycle. After the forum, many conservative pundits and commentators voiced their frustration with ABC News for frequently fact-checking Trump but ignoring false statements from Harris.
Conservative viewers called out ABC moderators’ question bias as they laid into Trump and his reversal on abortion access but failed to follow up with Harris when she dodged a question on her frequent policy flip-flops.
“This moderation is pretty bad. I wonder the average voter comes away thinking ‘I guess Kamala doesn’t say false stuff’ or ‘I wonder why ABC checks only one side.’”
The bias in #Debate2024 is insane. Everything ABC has asked has an angle to attack Trump in the question. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was the one in office the last 3.5 yrs instead of Kamala. They’ve let her lie and they refuse to confront her record of failure.
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) September 11, 2024
True but it doesn’t matter. ABC is so thoroughly in the tank for Harris that Trump is going to benefit from that extraordinary anti-Trump bias. https://t.co/TsgC0I1TSP
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) September 11, 2024
Ahead of the ABC News debate, the New York Times detailed Harris’ relationship with top Disney executive, Dana Walden. Disney is the parent company of ABC. Walden and Harris met in 1994 and their husbands have been friends since the 1980s, the outlet reported, noting that the vice president has joked that she met Doug Emhoff through Walden.
Walden and her husband have donated to Harris’s campaigns since 2003, according to the New York Times. ABC responded to the NYT article, claiming that Walden would not influence the debate and only oversees the news division for budgets and staff size. The Disney executive last hosted a fund-raiser for Harris when she started overseeing ABC News in June of 2022.
After being fired from CBS News in February, award-winning investigative journalist Catherine Herridge told Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson there “was tension” at the network when she “sort of turned [her] lens” on Biden and his son, Hunter.
“I’ve always tried to be respectful of my former employers. And I testified to Congress that, I mean, there was tension over the Biden reporting. Especially when I sort of turned my lens on to President Biden,” Herridge told Carlson in July.
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