Why I won't stop watching CBS News after this week's '60 Minutes' fiasco
... because I already quit watching months ago
Last-minute gift idea that does not involve running out to the gas station mini-mart when all the other stores are closed to buy lottery tickets or microwave cheeseburgers: A subscription to the award-deserving Picayune Sentinel is a holiday present that keeps on giving — commentary, comedy, quips, tips and tirades delivered twice a week throughout the year. One size fits all. Usually in good taste. Satisfaction hoped for.
12-23-2025
This week:
A pox on both their budgets — Neither Mayor Brandon Johnson nor the alders with whom he’s warring have sound budget plans
What shall we predict when gazing into the crystal ball labeled 2026?
News and Views — Hot takes, fully baked
Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go
Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go
Media notes — The Chicago Reader is going to a monthly print cycle, and the Tribune still can’t get its tech act together
Quotables — A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately
NewsWheel — The puzzle your children wake up crying for
Quips — Visual jokes and written jokes together again!
Because of the holidays, there will be no Picayune Plus this week or next week — the full PS is coming out today and on Tuesday, Dec. 30
A pox on both their budgets!
I’ve been sharply critical of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s combative, even belligerent, rhetorical style in attempting to browbeat reluctant alders into accepting his budget proposal.
The administration “appeared uninterested in negotiation and (was) more focused on galvanizing people to choose a side,” to quote Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, who often sides with the mayor. “Either you support their proposal, or you’re standing with billionaires.”
But I’ve got to say that I share some of the mayor’s concerns with the spending plan that his opponents passed on Saturday and that now seems likely to survive any attempted mayoral veto.
The alternative proposal legalizes video gambling machines, increases the shopping bag tax from 10 cents to 15 cents, adds a 1.5% tax on retail liquor sales and expands congestion fee zones for rideshares. It also allows for ads to be placed on city-owned bridge houses and light poles.
The plan also calls for … the sale of city debt, and allowing “augmented reality” licensing on city properties, such as through games like Pokémon GO.
Thoughts on some of these:
Video gambling is a shabby manifestation of a culture in decline. I have no moral objection to gambling, and I appreciate the effort to bring it out from the organized-crime shadows, but it diverts entertainment resources, at best, and drives addicts to bankruptcy and despair at worst. Kitschy video poker and slot machine terminals belong in casinos. (At the same time, Mayor Brandon Johnson wants slot machines at Midway Airport.)
The shopping bag tax was sold to us as an environmental measure (though you have to use a canvas tote bag at least 131 times to even out the overall environmental costs of using single-use plastic bags). Now the tax has been revealed as just a cash grab — reminiscent of how speed cameras were sold to us as a safety measure until that pretense fell away. Raising the fee to 15 cents from 10 cents will likely increase the percentage of people bringing their own bags and result in less-than-expected revenue, and according to one academic study, lower income households will end up paying a disproportionate share of bag taxes.
Mayor Johnson has blasted the idea of selling to private bill collectors debt owed to the city from unpaid city ambulance payments, utility bills and red-light camera tickets as “morally bankrupt.” He said it would “result in debt collectors harassing residents who have fallen behind on some of their bills. … The means and the practices that they use in order to collect the debt are quite severe.” I share the mayor’s skepticism that companies will be willing to spend $90 million for the chance to recover some portion of the reported $8.2 billion in uncollected debt owed the city. Because such debts are largely uncollectible, private companies typically pay pennies on the dollar for the right to hunt down the deadbeats.
Ads on light poles seem unobtrusive enough, but putting them on other city property feels like a bridge house too far. We don’t want our city to look like a NASCAR driver’s fire suit.
The proposal to generate $6 million from advertisers that want to superimpose their messages on city landmarks to be seen by players of such augmented reality digital games as Pokémon GO is as far-fetched a notion as I’ve heard in a long time. No other city in the world has tried it.
The mayor’s budget team says his rivals’ budget will come up $163 million short next year, and even that seems optimistic. But Johnson’s plan, which includes a legally dubious tax on large social media companies of 50 cents per active user per month and a monthly, per-employee “head tax” on large corporations that has been roundly rejected by the council majority, looks similarly flimsy.
At his Substack “The Last Ward,” my fellow “Mincing Rascal” Austin Berg listed “three lowlights” that both proposals have in common:
A record one-time TIF sweep of over $1 billion, which gives Chicago Public Schools a property tax windfall of $550 million. This functions as a property tax hike that avoids the voter participation required under the state’s tax-cap framework.
Excessive, back-loaded borrowing in part to fund operating expenses, including Chicago Fire Department back pay from a new contract the city knew it could not fund without debt.
No skin in the game from government employees. No pay cuts. No pay freezes. No furlough days. And no reforms to pay more for extremely generous health care benefits, as recommended in a recent EY report on efficiencies.2
Both sides have renounced an increase in the garbage collection fee and a direct increase in property taxes. Again, I point readers to the recent op-ed from another “Mincing Rascal,” Cate Plys, “How Mayor Brandon Johnson can help the budget and make the city’s trash fee more equitable” (gift link), in which she explains why those who live in apartment or condo buildings with more than four units are particularly screwed by the current rate schedule.
Johnson has looked feckless and flailing in his efforts to bring the alders to heel. His comparison of his fight for the head tax to civil rights crusades and battles for gender equality have come off as obtuse and histrionic complaints from his allies that we’re seeing a replay of the racist “Council Wars” of the 1980s have been feeble given that Mayor Johnson — unlike Mayor Harold Washington — is opposed by a multiracial coalition. If he vetoes the budget, alders fearing a shutdown of city services will doubtlessly join in the vote to override. If he signs the budget despite his objections and the toxic accusations he has employed criticizing those behind it, he’ll risk appearing weak.
A strong indication that he will sign the alternative plan and declare it a victory came in a statement released over the weekend from Stacy Davis Gates, head of the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson’s former employer and his main source of campaign funds last cycle. While continuing to blast the “corporate caucus” that opposes the employee head tax, it states:
Nearly everything in this budget was part of Mayor Johnson’s original plan to protect Chicagoans. We have the largest investment in schools, parks, and libraries at any time in our city’s history. We are protecting youth jobs and securing more than $500 million in TIF funding for our school communities. We are sustaining and expanding investment in mental health care and violence prevention programs that are making our neighborhoods safer.
Would things have gone better — some compromises, some more sound projections — if Johnson had tamped down the accusatory rhetoric and not done so much “negotiating” in public? Maybe we’ll find out next year when Johnson and the alders try to hammer out a spending plan with just about two months until the municipal elections.
I wish I could quit you now, CBS News. Only, I already did.
Here was my message to CBS News back in July when the network’s parent company sold out its journalistic principles to pay President Donald Trump $16 million to settle a wholly bogus lawsuit he’d filed when he didn’t like how an interview with Kamala Harris had been edited.
They did it to help grease the way for a corporate merger and in the process lost me as a viewer forever. So I can’t take any further action in the wake of this week’s story
Just a day and a half before it was set to be broadcast, new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss pulled a planned 60 Minutes investigative segment centering on allegations of abuses at an El Salvador detention center where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants last March.
Weiss told colleagues this weekend the piece — planned for Sunday night’s show — could not run without an on-the-record comment from an administration official.
Complete bullshit.
Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi wrote in a furious email to fellow staffers “that she and her colleagues on the story had sought comments and interviews from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and the State Department.”
“Government silence is a statement, not a VETO,” Alfonsi wrote in the email. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’‘ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”
Scoundrels from time immemorial have hoped to kill inconvenient or embarrassing stories by refusing to comment, laboring under the until now naive delusion that journalists who can’t get their side of the story will shrug and move on. But as I’ve told more than one subject in my career, “I’m telling this story, and it can either include your version of events or not. It’s your choice.”
At this writing, 10 p.m. Monday, a stream of the disputed segment that was leaked via Canadian TV is posted to this Substack, but CBS is reportedly scrambling to get all such videos taken down. Interest in this subject and this segment — if and when it actually airs in re-edited form — is going to be much higher than it ever would have been had the segment run conventionally.
A classic example of the Streisand effect!
That Weiss held the story even after all those administration officials refused to offer CBS reporters a comment is infamous and wrong, and it suggests that she’s sucking up to the White House instead of pursuing the news without fear or favor. What a miserable excuse for an editor in chief.
The story had undergone repeated formal reviews by senior producers and news executives, as well as people from the legal and standards division, according to the two people at CBS, echoing Alfonsi's account.
It gets worse:
In an earlier review of the (prison) report, Weiss had objected to the men being called “Venezuelan migrants” rather than “illegal immigrants” — a term favored by the Trump administration. Many of those sent to the Salvadoran prison were not in this country illegally and had applied for asylum, awaiting a decision on their applications.
Adam Kinzinger let loose on Substack:
If the new leadership at CBS insists that accountability journalism requires the administration’s cooperation, then CBS is effectively announcing that accountability journalism will be optional whenever the White House finds it inconvenient. And once you normalize that, the next segment won’t just be delayed. It will be quietly buried. The next reporter will pre-bury their own work. The message will be received: don’t put the network in a fight it doesn’t want. Don’t force a confrontation with the people who control access, approvals, mergers, and regulatory leverage. Don’t make trouble.
The book that someone is going to write about this era will be called “Profiles in Cowardice,” and CBS is going to deserve its own chapter.
Last week’s winning quip
He’s making a list. He’s checkin’ it twice. He left it at home. He’s texting his wife. — @ThePunnyWorld
Here are this week’s nominees. Here is the direct link to the new poll.
A call for known unknowns
Next week, I’ll publish the results of my “What do we predict for 2025?” survey and post the questions for 2026.
Will President Donald Trump pardon P. Diddy?
Will Toni Preckwinkle be reelected Cook County Board chairman?
How many playoff games will the Bears play in?
Will the Democrats win control of the U.S. House?
And so on. But I’d like your help. In comments or via email (ericzorn@gmail.com) please submit multiple-choice (including yes/no) questions that will have a definite, measurable correct answer a year from now. Not, for instance, “Will there be peace in the Middle East?” or “Will Chicago be on firm financial footing?” Consult last year’s questions for guidance. And thanks!
News & Views
News: Bowen Yang is leaving “Saturday Night Live” midway through the season.
View: Rats! Yang is a brilliant, versatile, top performer in the show’s 50-year history. Former Chicagoan Sarah Sherman moves up to No. 1 in my ranking of the current cast.
News: “Chicago Police Board Votes to Fire Officer Who Tested Positive for Marijuana.”
View: Grow up, Chicago Police Board. If an officer in impaired on the job, OK, but marijuana is legal, and using it off the job — as this officer was alleged to have done — should be no different than drinking while off the job.
Land of Linkin’
I learned a new term the other day — “duvet divorce” — in “The Case for the Scandinavian Sleep Method.” The article outlines the virtues of a nighttime setup with your partner in which “you share a bed, but switch out the large comforter for two blankets,” one for each of you. And it passes along a finding from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) that a third of Americans sleep in a different bed from their partners.
Block Club Chicago: “34 Heated Patios and Rooftops In Chicago Where You Can Eat, Drink And Be Merry This Winter.”
Regular readers of the Picayune Sentinel comments section will recognize the name Phillip Seeberg. This video featuring him, “How A Jewish Convert to Christianity Celebrated His First Christmas,” popped up in my feed the other day.
The hilariously gory alternate ending to “Home Alone,” as envisioned over the weekend in a “Saturday Night Live” recorded segment, recalled “‘Salad Days’ by Sam Peckinpah” and “The Black Knight” from Monty Python.
Chicago Magazine: “Our 20 Most-Read Stories of 2025.” About half of them are annoying clickbait — the best fries in Chicago and so on — but there’s some real journalism here, too.
Politico on the rise of the idea of “Medicare for all” among Democrats. As someone who is happily on Medicare for geezers, I’m behind it.
Public funding for sports stadiums: A primer and research roundup — For those in Arlington Heights, northwest Indiana, Chicago and the General Assembly who are wondering how much to help the Bears move to the sort of domed stadium they ought to have built a quarter of a century ago when instead they built that inadequate outdoor venue on top of the old Soldier Field.
Squaring up the news
This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:
■ The New York Times (gift link): “Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty.”
■ Trump’s deputy chief of staff is firing back after critics compared his haircut in that Vanity Fair photoshoot to Hitler’s. The photographer got off a zinger in an exchange with the president’s consigliere, Stephen Miller.
■ Circular firing squad: In Turning Point USA’s first gathering since the assassination of its founder, Charlie Kirk, conservative leaders expended lots of energy insulting one another.
■ The Intercept: The New York Times’ David Brooks “said there’s too much focus on Jeffrey Epstein. Here he is hanging with Epstein.”
■ Below the Belt(way)’s created “a searchable database for the Epstein Files.”
■ “He owes the city quite a bit”: A Chicago City Council member’s sounding an alarm about Barack Obama’s old boss—who the Sun-Times says “owes City Hall more than $40,000 in unpaid water bills … and more than $360,000 in fees and fines” and yet still has business with the city.
■ “Welcome everyone by shouting Six-Seven! and waving your arms”: DadWrites proprietor Michael Rosenbaum offers tips for avoiding embarrassment at your holiday dinner.
■ Author and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich makes a case for not greeting older people with “You look great!” (Which your Square columnist got a lot at a funeral a couple of weeks back.)
You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.
Media notes
The Chicago Reader is going to a monthly print publication cycle
New City, Chicago’s other free alternative publication, went from weekly to monthly in 2017 and is still hanging in there, and I hope the Reader, which has always been more ambitious than New City, hangs on as well. Print advertisers evidently still make the effort to put ink on alt paper worthwhile, but it’s hard to imagine that members of the target demographic of both publications are accustomed to getting their information on anything other than screens.
Tribune’s iPad app still subject to inexplicable, sudden magnification
Such lazy engineering.
Quotables
A collection of compelling, sometimes appalling passages I’ve encountered lately
Here’s a useful, counterintuitive fact: One 18-inch pizza has roughly 12% more square inches of pizza — π(18/2)² = 254 square inches — that two 12-inch pizzas — 2π(12/2)² = 226 inches. — unknown
The Epstein files went from being a “hoax” to a “national security threat” if released. — Adame Media
(President Donald Trump’s) sociopathy is destiny. His narcissism; his lack of conscience, remorse, or empathy; his pathological lying and grandiosity; his sense of entitlement, impulsivity, and aggression; his cruelty, predatory behavior, and sadism—these are the forces that drive him. If we don’t understand that, we understand almost nothing of importance about him. And beware: When a man with Trump’s personality feels caged in, when he feels besieged and abandoned and begins to lose control of events, he becomes more desperate and more dangerous. — Pete Wehner
Giving public money to a professional sports franchise doesn’t crack the top 100 things the people of Illinois are asking for, expecting, or willing to tolerate right now. …. It’s important to say this out loud: as people across Illinois are reeling from the weight of rising property taxes, they are not interested in a professional sports franchise cutting to the front of the line for a property tax break while families are still fighting to make their own tax bills make sense. — State Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago
CBS NEWS: “We can’t report on the current murdering spree until we get the serial killer’s side of the story.” — Betty Bowers
Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. … January 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 100 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police officers that day. Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election. — Former special counsel Jack Smith
Jack Smith is a lying hack who willingly weaponized the justice system against President Trump to try and benefit his Democrat cronies. — White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson
The only thing worse than a narcissistic sociopath in an unbelievably petty narcissistic sociopath. — Bill Kristol
NewsWheel
Inspired by the WordWheel puzzle in the Monday-Friday Chicago Tribune and other papers, this puzzle — a regular feature of the Tuesday Picayune Plus — asks you to identify the missing letter that will make a word or words — possibly proper nouns; reading either clockwise or counterclockwise — related to a story in the news or other current event. The solution is at the bottom of the newsletter.
Quips
In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers then vote for their favorite. So here are this week’s nominees:
The new nominees for Quip of the Week:
A dark day for parents is when their child stops believing in Santa and suddenly you lose all that leverage. — @RealRodLacroix
Where do I find a copy of the naughty list? I’d like to do some networking. — @WestofCrazy
Santa Claus is coming to town and he needs to crash on your couch, just for a few days, man. And can he borrow $100? — @buckyisotope.bsky.social
It’s National Suspense Month. … Or is it? — @jakevig.bsky.social
[first date] Her: OMG! Are you wearing a cape? LOL. Me: [texting mom] OK, you were right about the cape. — @stevesuckington.bsky.social
Being someone’s bodyguard if they’ll be your long-lost pal is a rookie mistake. — @bornmiserable.bsky.social
A recap of the possible options for waking me up: AFTER you go-go. BEFORE you go-go. The choice should be obvious — @jakevig.bsky.social
Are we there yet? I'm hungry. How much further? I need the toilet. Do you want to play I Spy? Can I smell the frankincense again? I'm really tired. Shall I sing another song? Are we nearly there yet? … The Fourth Wise Man whose body was never found. — @TheWriterType
Friend: Our basement just flooded. We have to cancel game night. Me: (covering the phone) That’s a bit extreme! Genie: Two wishes left. — @whatsjo.bsky.social
Sorry, I’ll never be ready to rumble. Go ahead and rumble without me. — @donni.bsky.social
Vote here and check the current results in the poll.
For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.
Why “quips”? See “I’m rebranding ‘Tweet of the Week’ in a gesture of contempt for Elon Musk.” Also, I’m finding good stuff on BlueSky now as well.
Unpopular opinions?
This week’s question:
Starting late next week, the U.S. National Park Service will implement"America-first" pricing for foreign visitors at 11 popular national parks. For example, at Grand Canyon National Park U.S. residents pay a $35 per vehicle fee for a 7-day pass. Foreign visitors pay the same, plus a $100 per person surcharge for everyone in the car ages 16 and older.
This is to help pay for park maintenance and improvements and is said by supporters to be fair to U.S residents, whose taxes cover more than 90% of the NPS operating budget.
Info
I am a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. I began publishing the Picayune Sentinel on Sept. 9, 2021, roughly two and a half months after I took a buyout from the newspaper. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise. Browse and search back issues here.
Contact
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I read all the messages that come in, but I do most of my interacting with readers in the comments section beneath each issue.
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Thanks for reading!
Answer to the NewsWheel puzzle
REINDEER
As this very bad, terrible, ghastly year draws to a close, I would like to wish everyone a very happy holiday (may your god, if you have one, go with you) and peace and joy in the New Year. "Everyone" does not include Trump, his rump osculators and enablers, his funders, or the cowards who capitulate to him. A murrain upon them!
"The Epstein files went from being a “hoax” to a “national security threat” if released."
The ever increasing list of "national security risks" seems to be growing daily, including Trump's billion dollar ballroom, all offshore windmill projects, tariffs, Venezuelan fishermen, etc... it's the current blanket excuse for anything Trump wants to block from court (or Congressional) interference.
I'm waiting for the inevitable Onion list, coming soon I'm sure.