CBS’s iconic 60 Minutes has had plenty of scandals and embarrassments in its long 57-year history, most notably the fake-but-accurate Dan Rather mess. Yet never has it found itself in greater disrepute than in 2024.
Donald Trump, for good reason, recently declined to join 60 Minutes for its traditional election-year in-depth interviews of the two presidential candidates. Why?
Last time he consented in 2020, anchor and interviewer Leslie Stahl attacked Trump’s accurate assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop (then in the possession of the FBI) was authentic—and authentically damning to Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy.
Stahl falsely claimed the laptop “can’t be verified.” She further incorrectly asserted, “So this story about Hunter and his laptop, some repair shop found it; the source is Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani.” The New York Post, in fact, reported the story. The FBI did not deny it.
Yet old Twitter and Facebook, under collaborating FBI tutelage and pressure, suppressed dissemination of the truth. Joe Biden’s then-advisor and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in conjunction with former interim CIA Director Michael Morrel, helped round up “51 former intelligence authorities” (among them Leon Panetta and both John Brennan and James Clapper, who had admitted previously of lying under oath to Congress) to claim falsely that the laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian information gambit to warp the election.
Joe Biden used the “expert” consensus to further lie in the last Biden-Trump debate that the laptop was cooked up by the Russians. And neither CBS, the “intelligence authorities,” nor any of the Bidens have ever since apologized.
More recently, CBS got caught selectively editing the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, cutting and pasting an incoherent Harris response to lessen her embarrassing word salad. And in a subsequent interview with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the network once again edited and pruned his answers, but in contrast, on this occasion, to make him seem far less persuasive.
In yet another current CBS interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, network host Tony Dokoupil honestly questioned Coates about his new, one-sided, anti-Israeli book The Message. The result was that the left-wing icon Coates was almost immediately revealed to be abjectly ignorant of the Middle East, unapologetically biased, and completely uninterested in any viewpoint other than his own partisan prejudices.
Yet what followed proved yet another network embarrassment. An internal CBS division with the eerie Orwellian title of “CBS News Race and Culture Unit” attacked Dokoupil for not providing “context” for Coates’s self-condemnatory and embarrassing interview. The subtext was that CBS, under pressure from woke zealots, simply disowned Dokoupil and sought to subject him to correct thought training. His apparent crime was not insisting on different—softball—journalistic standards for woke black authors like Coates. In other words, CBS blamed Dokoupil for revealing Coates to be a fool on the air.
The network further diminished its eroding reputation yet again through the unprofessional conduct of recent moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan during the J.D. Vance/Tim Walz vice presidential debate.
After the earlier ABC-sponsored debate between presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, in which the moderators became partisan fact-checkers (and often wrongly so) of Trump alone and drilled him on follow-up questions in a way not accorded Harris, CBS promised not to repeat such a network embarrassment. So, it pledged not to fact-check the two vice presidential candidates and instead to present a “fair” moderation of the event.
Instead, the CBS moderators were even more patently one-sided than the prior disastrous ABC performance. The two broke their own pre-debate rules by indeed fact-checking. But, even worse, they fact-checked Vance alone. And, once again, did so erroneously in a way that only exposed their unprofessional partiality.
Given the prior ABC debate sham, CBS was supposedly determined not to turn off the public with more moderator partisan distortions. Instead, the network proved that if it was a question of further eroding its professional brand or helping elect the Harris/Walz progressive ticket, then CBS would predictably choose to jettison its reputation to further the progressive cause.
Just as CBS is no longer the network television standard, so too has the current generation of partisans done their best to sully the New York Times. Within just a few days, the Times embarrassed itself in ways similar to the partisanship so toxic at CBS.
The Times just published an op-ed, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.” What followed were testimonials from medical officials and doctors in Gaza with truly harrowing stories of Israel’s collateral damage and the shooting of civilians, accompanied by X-ray photos of small children with IDF bullets allegedly lodged in their bodies and heads.
But even if one was not aware of the fables promulgated by Hamas and the history of propagandistic attacks on Israel, and even if there was no corroboration of how the victims died and under what conditions, a novice might have sensed that something was not quite right with the evidentiary X-rays.
Experts pointed out that the embedded bullets in the scans appeared pristine, without any fragmentation after entering skulls or midriff sections. There were no apparent entry and exit wounds on the images—suggesting either that it was unlikely the bullets came from IDF-issued high-velocity weapons or that the X-rays might simply have been rephotographed with IDF bullets placed beneath them. In any case, the New York Times did not cite any expert outside reviewer to authenticate the scans.
Recently, the New York Times again rushed to partisan judgment to persuade the public that current charges of abject plagiarism by presidential candidate Vice President Harris were baseless. Accusations arose that Harris and her coauthor in a past book on crime had plagiarized a number of sources multiple times.
Yet the Times claimed the copying was minor and did not rise to the level of actionable plagiarism. It “proved” this by quoting a plagiarism “expert,” Jonathan Bailey, who, it implied, had consulted all the alleged plagiarism passages.
But once the public saw just a few of the passages in question, almost immediately it concluded otherwise: that Harris and her co-author were indeed plagiarists. That forced Bailey, the original Times expert, to reconsider his initial opinion: “At the time, I was unaware of a full dossier with additional allegations, which led some to accuse the New York Times of withholding that information from me. However, the article clearly stated that it was my ‘initial reaction’ to those allegations, not a complete analysis.”
Bailey then concluded that Harris had indeed committed plagiarism but not “maliciously” so. Once again, the Times had not verified its assertions before publication, and once again it had erred on the side of its known partisanship.
The Times and CBS are just a small example of current once-prestige outlets—such as ABC (cf. its moderators during the Harris-Trump presidential debate) and NPR (that just retracted its scurrilous charges against journalist Rich Lowry)—who have consistently abused the public’s trust for the partisan benefit of progressives or their causes.
In sum, the trust and prestige that took prior generations of journalists decades to earn have been thrown away in just a few years by incompetents and partisans—on the ancient, flawed principle that the supposedly superior moral ends justify any means necessary to achieve them.
What is being done goes back to Nixon who wondered how it was even possible for a Republican to be elected considering the journalism at that time. Did not Mark Twain say that “if you didn’t read the news you were uninformed and if you read it you were misinformed”? Mark Levin wrote a book entitled “Unfreedom of the Press”. He wrote a lot and he wrote it well. Nevertheless the author is being too kind. This is no ordinary election associated with some expected bad choices. What about the policies? This election will determine America’s future and, let’s not be too narcissistic, also the future of the world and it is being framed by deceitful people who should know the possible scenarios awaiting the next transfer of power. Are they that stupid or is humankind still just a step above our tribal forbearers so that we follow the rest of media right over the cliff thinking that somehow we will all be lucky or that total destruction is worth preventing Donald Trump from doing all the right things which the country and world needs? I say this after having spoken to 3 women who say everything Trump is doing, policy wise, they like except they don’t like him. And that is where it stops. These women live in an economic bubble and it is a good one. I suspect many others also feel the same way but don’t have that advantage. However never forget that it is more than the media that is in play. In 2020 the Common Wealth Court of PA determined that over 500,000 ballots should not have been counted since they violated not just Article II but also the clear language of the very old PA Constitution. Never forget whose side Marc Elias is on who gave PA the two radical Supremes that simply did not care just the way that DC Justice Chutkan doesn’t care about the fact that the prosecutor she relies upon is not only an unfit disgrace but also illegal.
I kind of chuckled reading this article as it seemed to me Professor Hanson was explaining what we already know.
A humorous example would be like standing across the street from a cat house counting the number of Johns who enter and exit, then declaring for all the world to know that in that house of questionable patronage, sexual liaisons in exchange for money was taking place.
Whatever reputation or degree of respect the Enemedia might have once enjoyed, they have long since shed it in favor of hyper-partisanship on the declared motive that they are pursuing a higher calling and the end justifies the means.
By the Enemedia’s reasoning, I guess hunger and shelter count as justifiable motives. Hey, prostitutes gotta eat, too.
You open a book to a particular passage and immediately start thinking about something else. Meanwhile, a less distracted part of your brain secretly hoovers up said passage. Later, while writing something you believe is ‘totally’ original, you reproduce it word for word and pat yourself on your back for originality. Got it.
For future mea culpa and good old-fashioned CYA, schools of journalism should include the weasel phrase “initial reaction” in all their instruction now that shilling for Democrats has become as institutionally hazardous as cleaning up a toxic waste spill.
My belief is that today’s reporters and TV hosts know nothing beyond the Narrative. And they instinctively know that outside the Narrative there be dragons.
Why do we subscribe to sites like American Greatness? Could one of the reasons be that it, like other sites, functions to relate news and commentary which none of us would ever read or hear elsewhere, or read viewpoints not found elsewhere?
The correct term for what passes for “journalist” is “presstitute”. Lacking any curiosity regarding domestic and international events and trends, presstitutes are happy to collect their fees, lay back and enjoy their degradation.
The FCC’s approval of Gyorgy Schwartz’s latest acquisition of 200 radio stations demonstrates what happens when government solves “problems” like dissemination of facts and truth. One has to admit that government in this country has managed to destroy every good thing, everywhere.