Almost every mainstream media figure had the same take on this week’s CBS News staff revolt against the new management named to run 60 Minutes.
Correspondent Scott Pelley was cheered for telling his new bosses, in a meeting that was then leaked to the media, that they had “murdered” the show and not stood up for “real journalists.” A day after Pelley’s ambush, CBS fired him thus allowing him to take up a new role as a free-speech martyr.
Former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens quickly jumped into the controversy by telling the New York Press Club that CBS and 60 Minutes are “institutions, not places where partisans and ideologues should be employed…. I can tell you there’s a rigor in how 60 Minutes approaches every story. That isn’t what this crew is looking to do.”
Give. Me. A. Break. 60 Minutes was a great show for its first few decades, but in recent years it has consistently leaned into trendy liberal narratives and lefty presumptions. It has also aired some spectacularly wrong segments on key issues
Take three dominant news items from just the year 2020 alone.
In May, two months after the Covid state of emergency, Pelley interviewed virus expert Peter Daszak over his complaint that a $3.7 million National Institute of Health grant to his EcoHealth Alliance had been canceled. To an audience of millions, Daszak claimed the Trump administration was engaged in political interference with his investigations into the origins of Covid. At the same time, he co-wrote an op-ed in the Lancet medical journal that any suggestion the virus could have been a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a “conspiracy theory.”
But documents that were public at the time of the 60 Minutes interview showed Daszak’s EcoHealth group had given US taxpayer money to the Institute for the purpose of developing “therapeutics” – i.e., vaccines. So the scientist who led opposition to the claim that Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab had funded the institute at the center of the controversy. But Pelley never questioned Daszak’s assertions, deferring to his status as a “scientist.” Since then, Daszak has been discredited and banned from receiving any federal funding.
Geoffrey Ingersoll, head of the National Journalism Center, says that the Pelley interview helped dictate “the parameters of legitimate inquiry (and) delayed vigorous inspection of all the facts. It gave China and the institutions and individuals at the center of the damage enough time to cover their tracks.”
Nor was 60 Minutes finished with muddying the waters on Covid. It ran several stories backing the theory that public schools should be closed to prevent the spread of the virus, at a time when there was abundant evidence they were safer than staying at home. Testing, for example, showed the fatality rate of people younger than 18 was less than for those who got the flu. Students have yet to fully recover from the learning loss they suffered from closures.
Finally, when Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes interviewed Donald Trump after his election in November 2016 she flatly told him that the contents of Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop “could not” be verified. But the month before, the Daily Caller reported cybersecurity expert Robert Graham had authenticated a key email using Google’s own email infrastructure.
I’m not surprised at media circling the wagons and trying to turn the staff of 60 Minutes into poster children for embattled journalism. But please spare us the sanctimony and piousness with which they claim the show has been a paragon of broadcast accuracy and objectivity.
What is undeniable is that change is inevitably coming to CBS in an age of streaming media. Last year, Pew Research found that the average age of people following the network (63) was the second oldest out of 30 top media outlets. As Nick Bilton, the new executive producer at 60 Minutes, tried to tell the show’s mutineers this week: “Broadcast is an ice cube that is melting. How are we going to make this product continue to work amid massive disruption in how people want to consume content?”
That is the story the 60 Minutes staff don’t want to hear and their media allies didn’t want to report this week.
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