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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.
I don’t understand how anyone with any sense could trust these media sources.
Then again, we are talking about demodemons.
People like the Demodemons usually believe whatever they want to believe. We’re all subject to that impulse but conservatives tend to think things through instead of relying on emotions like hatred. They see what they believe while we believe what we see. That’s the simplest way I know how to express the main difference between lefties and conservatives/moderates/normal people.
The media are maggots and like maggots they lie by omission & commission, deflect, divert & slander. They treat people like mushrooms, drop anything they find embarrassing down the memory hole & slander anyone who reminds them of it. They are totally without honour, honesty or integrity like the maggots they are. The sooner they die off & are consigned to history the better. Future historians will wonder how a flickering box in the corner of lounge room could mesmerise & enslave to many generations of sheeple.
Garbage flies produce an excessive amount of maggots but here’s looking to a day oikophobic and destructive is abandoned by Western society and suppressed by the majority for the safety of humanity.
Most all our M.S. Media Bottom Feeders are Leftists Propagandists with the NYT’s and CNN leading the Way
CNN and the NYT and MSNBC are piles of pig sh*t with ABC, NBC and CBS being the foul stench that emanates from those piles of pig sh*t.
Yes, the Minitru Media are bottom feeding, left-wing propagandists, to say the least. And what do you find at the bottom of septic tanks, swamps and turd piles? Dirtbagocrats. I sure wish they would stay down there and stop spreading their disease.
This has been going on for centuries in the US. Each political party had several newspapers that it used to get its’ ideas or plans to the public. The idea was the same. Create a groundswell of opinion to enforce your plans. Jefferson and Adams were the first examples.
The difference today is that there are only a few large media groups and they are owned by the same cabal that owns Wall Street and feels superior. It was easily controlled until the internet came alive. The old wooden headed liberals are the only ones left who are consumers of the lefts’ drivel. That is why you see the viewers rapidly decreasing. They are dying off. The transition breakout is led by Musk but there are obviously other sources, Front Page for example. We shall see how things grow or are throttled by the big bucks and Bidens’ Department of Misinformation and chicky who got fired.. Remember that? Why no mention in the republican campaign? More incompetence of course!
All excellent points. Moreover, if it were possible, they would exert complete control over the internet but thankfully, given the architecture of the internet, that’s nearly impossible.
I say nearly impossible because the only other means available to them to control the internet is to shut down the power grid across the nation and forbid the sale of laptop computer batteries (Starlink, Viasat, Inmarsat and a several other companies provide the internet via satellite.)
Thanks to the internet, the network MSM is being rendered legacy media. Their day in the sun is almost over and the evening shadows are starting to fall upon them. Like black & white TV, typewriters and tie-dyed T-shirts, the MSM will go quietly into the night and never see another dawn. That’s something to look forward to.
Simply put, the internet has revolutionized access to information. The establishment and their ruling class masters cannot put that genie back into the bottle.
Google sure has a lot of power when it comes to despoiling the web by largely controlling search engines.
Instagram, Tik Tock and Facebook pollute social media but Elon Musk flushed the worst of Twitter and replaced the people and sociopolitical manipulation it was infamous for. Banning the President of the United States of America? Are you kidding me? Hosting the ayatollah and any jihadi terrorists with guns and bombs, lefty death threats and demonstrable lies, and so on.
Maybe if Trump beats the disgusting level of vote rigging, cheating and fraud this time around, maybe he’ll go after Google for its obviously illegal conduct, the way he should’ve done the first time. And the Minitru Media, as well. The FCC shouldn’t allow subversive liars to publicize Dirtbagocrat propaganda. Their licenses need to be revoked.
“All the hallmarks of Russian …” the keyword is hallmark . By stating their lie this way they could. It looked like it.
Although, actually, it did not have the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. The Russians typically didn’t put disinformation directly into major Western newspapers. They liked to place the stories in obscure foreign newspapers and then “report” on those papers’ articles with the idea that the stories would eventually make it to the West and surreptitiously infect our media. Also, Stall probably never asked them but the FBI had authenticated the laptop many months before the New York Post published its story. You would think that someone with CBS might have asked the FBI if it had analyzed the laptop and what it had concluded about its authenticity. Seems like pretty basic journalism.
Not only that but Putin wanted his asset, Bolshevik Biden, as the American President the same way he’d wanted Madame Commie Clinton.
Bias at the top. Incompetent at the bottom..
Dr Hanson you’ve hit Gold again! Thank You!!!
Yep. “Ends justify the means” about nails it. Somewhere, Marx is laughing.
“No matter how much you despise the legacy corporate propaganda media in this country, it isn’t enough.”
Quite frankly, they don’t give a damn. Why? Question: what can you (or I) do to stop them? Realistically, nothing of any real or lasting consequences. You and I and a few others can simple tune them out (i.e., turn off the TV) but we have no assurances that the vast majority of Americans will do the same and therein lies the problem.
Far too many Americans have been conditioned, to put it politely, to get their news and info from the MSM. Moreover, to call the crap the MSM serves up as “news” is quite often intellectual pablum fit for gullible dimwits and the chicken little types.
I regard watching MSM news as self inflicted mental torture & abuse.
The vast majority of Americans are a great deal poorer than they were 4 years ago, so maybe there is still hope.
Perhaps. But some people have to hit rock bottom before they’re receptive to hearing and accepting the unmitigated truth.
In a larger sense, that implies that things have to get much worse than the are now. That reality has to be such that Americans are shocked by what they see and what’s happening to them and around them and are no longer content to passively standing by and doing nothing.
Beyond the bounds of the US Constitution is revolution. Politicians would be wise to be wary and rue the day when we the American people have little choice but to step outside the bounds of the US Constitution to restore out country.
The entire country is suffering from “battered wife syndrome”. Some wives can eventually find support and free themselves from the abuse. Where does an entire country go when the abuse can no longer be tolerated? The answer is a place none of us want to go.
Good. Sometime poverty is the hard slap in the face that some people need.
I have argued for MANY years, back to Bill Clinton, that the worst enemy is NOT the politician, but the dishonest press that lies to support him/her. Thank you VDH and all others who support my argument.