CBS Sunday Morning spotlights junker cars, Iran propaganda, Patti LaBelle
CBS Sunday Morning stretched from junkers in Monterey to Iran’s online propaganda war, then landed on Patti LaBelle’s 82nd birthday.
Lee Cowan’s Sunday Morning used a 90-minute national broadcast to move from junkers to geopolitics to music royalty, a mix that showed how legacy appointment TV still reaches for breadth as much as depth. The episode aired at 9:00 a.m. ET on CBS and streamed at 11:00 a.m. ET on the CBS News app, pairing spectacle, foreign policy and nostalgia in a single morning slot.
One stop was the Concours d'Lemons, the deliberately unruly counterpart to the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in California’s Monterey Peninsula. Just a few miles from one of the most prestigious car shows in the world, the Concours d'Lemons celebrated the unloved, the junkers and the failures of the automotive world. Alan Galbraith stitched it together in 2009 and calls himself the “head gasket” of Concours d'Lemons. The event’s categories said exactly what kind of automotive anti-glamour it was selling: Swedish Meatball, Soul Sucking Japanese Appliance and Rust Belt American Junk.
The episode also turned to a far more serious contest, framing an online propaganda war between the United States and Iran as a fight for attention, credibility and narrative control. CBS said Ted Koppel examined how Iran was using AI, satire and social media in that struggle, and described the story as unfolding as the war with Iran approached the three-month mark. The segment underscored how modern conflict now extends far beyond battlefields, with digital influence and rapid-fire messaging becoming part of the public record in real time.
The broadcast’s emotional center came from Patti LaBelle, who turned 82 on May 24, 2026. Tracy Smith interviewed the Philadelphia native in her hometown, where LaBelle reflected on a career that stretched across six decades, hit records and Grammys. CBS called her the “Godmother of Soul,” and the profile leaned into the durability of a performer whose reputation has outlasted multiple eras of pop music. By placing LaBelle alongside junk cars and Iran’s information war, Sunday Morning made a familiar case for the magazine format: a broad audience will still sit through culture, politics and memory if the package feels expansive enough.
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