CBS News is the news division of the American television network CBS, which is owned by the media conglomerate Viacom.

CBS’ news programs include the CBS Evening News, the long-running newsmagazine 60 Minutes, the morning program The Early Show, and the Sunday morning talk show CBS News Sunday Morning.

CBS has been for years the lowest-rated of the three American network news divisions, behind NBC and ABC. In early 2010, CBS News cut dozens of jobs and was reported to be losing money.

In May 2010, CBS and CNN were reportedly in talks to pool their newsgathering operations, though a full-fledged merger was considered unlikely. (The two organizations had also been rumored to be discussing a partnership previously, in 2008 and 1999.)

In 2004, CBS News ran a broadcast presenting documents critical of President George W. Bush’s military service. Those documents’ authenticity was widely challenged, and the ensuing controversy resulted in the ouster of four CBS News executives and a multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought by former anchor Dan Rather. In response to the scandal, CBS News launched the Public Eye blog to examine its own newsgathering operation. The blog was updated until late 2009. 60 Minutes underwent a similar controversy in 2013 when it was forced to retract a story centering on a false account of the 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi. The story’s reporter, Lara Logan, and its editor were given indefinite leaves of absence; Logan returned to work in June 2014. That story, along with a credulous one that followed on the National Security Agency, caused some to question whether 60 Minutes’ journalistic skepticism had eroded.