CBS News managed to confuse the reigning British monarch with a man who's been dead for more than three centuries. The network posted on X referring to King Charles III — the current, living, breathing King of England — as "King Charles II," the Stuart monarch who died in 1685 following an apoplectic fit.
The post went up around 6 AM on Wednesday. It took CBS News more than a full day to issue a correction.
A previous version of this post erroneously referred to King Charles II. It has been corrected and the original post deleted.
That was CBS News's mea culpa — antiseptic, passive, and more than 24 hours late. The original post had already been deleted before 9:30 AM, but the damage was done.
UK commentator Rupert Myers didn't let the moment pass quietly:
The BBC's official US broadcast partner is now doing journalism by ouija board (Charles II died in 1685)
For anyone who skipped the Horrible Histories episode: Charles II was born in 1630, succeeded his executed father Charles I in 1660 after years of exile in France, while Oliver Cromwell ran England as Lord Protector, and died at 54, leaving no legitimate heir after a 25-year reign. He is — to put it gently — not the man CBS was writing about.
The underlying story CBS was attempting to cover actually mattered, the Daily Mail reported. King Charles III had indicated on Monday that the British royal family would cooperate if police came asking questions about his younger brother, former Prince Andrew's ties to Jeffrey Epstein. That's a significant development. And CBS botched the most basic detail — the monarch's name.
This is CBS News under its new leadership. Bari Weiss, the former opinion journalist who founded the Free Press, took charge of the network in October at the behest of Paramount boss David Ellison, who rose to the position after Paramount's August merger with Skydance. She was Ellison's handpicked choice — a bold bet on a media outsider with no experience leading a major news organization.
Her first major hire as editor-in-chief was Matt Gutman, a longtime former ABC journalist, brought on as chief correspondent. Executives at ABC reportedly let the correspondent go without a fight, according to the Daily Mail.
Then came the highly publicized town hall with Erika Kirk last month — a primetime event that averaged just 1.9 million viewers, an 11% decline in total viewership from the same window the prior year and a 41% drop in the key 25-54 demographic.
None of this is fatal on its own. New leadership takes time. Audiences shift slowly. But the trajectory matters — and confusing a living head of state with a 17th-century monarch is not the kind of mistake that builds credibility during a transition.
Here's what makes this more than a typo. Media organizations ask the public to trust them on enormously consequential stories — elections, wars, criminal investigations, and intelligence assessments. They demand to be taken seriously. They bristle when called "fake news." They lecture about the dangers of misinformation.
And then they can't get a king's number right.
This isn't about one Roman numeral. It's about what that Roman numeral reveals. If nobody in the CBS News pipeline — writer, editor, social media manager — caught the difference between III and II before hitting publish, what does that say about the editorial infrastructure behind stories that actually require judgment?
The correction took more than a day. A three-second fix to a one-character error. That's not a process problem. That's an attention problem.
Legacy media has spent the last decade insisting it deserves a privileged position in American public discourse — that professional journalism is categorically different from what happens on blogs, podcasts, and social media. The argument only works if the professionalism is visible. Every unforced error chips away at whatever remains of that distinction.
CBS isn't the first network to embarrass itself with a careless mistake, and it won't be the last. But the frequency matters. The public's trust in major media outlets didn't collapse overnight. It eroded — mistake by mistake, correction by correction, each one a little slower than the last.
The networks still don't seem to understand what they're competing against. They're not competing against each other anymore. They're competing against the assumption that they're not worth trusting. Every 24-hour-late correction on a basic historical fact confirms the suspicion.
Charles II has been dead for 341 years. CBS News just introduced him to a whole new audience — as proof that the people covering the news can't always be bothered to read it first.