Editor tells news staff not to give CBS bad press

After the Dayton Daily News ran a review of the fall TV season giving all the networks mediocre grades, an editor for Cox Media Group, which owns the paper and the local affiliate, issued the edict in a memo.

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“Our news station—WHIO-TV is a CBS-affiliate station,” wrote Editor Rashida Rawls. “We do not want to run any stories that cast our station in a negative light or even allude to it negatively.”

The article that prompted the memo wasn’t even a Daily News story. It was a wire feature from the Minneapolis Star Tribune that the Daily News ran. In it, each network earned a middling grade or worse. CBS got a C.

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