Commentary
Last week, I commented on the changes underway at CBS News and only briefly mentioned that 60 minutes anchor Scott Pelley allowed his ego to take control of his brain.
Since being fired Pelley has been pleading his case to any media outlook that will listen to him. He broke down in tears several times during an interview with the New York Times as he discussed being axed after nearly four decades with the network.
Pelley exhibited his ignorance during that interview revealing that he didn’t know his new boss, Bari Weiss, before she took the job. “I suppose he was living in his own sort of bubble” not to know her background, wrote Robert Soave, opinion writer for The Hill.
Even I knew who she was. On December 1, 2022, I wrote about Elon Musk commissioning her and Matt Taibbi to review thousands of Twitter’s internal documents prior to his takeover. She was an opinion writer for the TIMES for four years. More recently she founded the Free Press, of which I was a subscriber. Pelley should be embarrassed not knowing of her.
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The day the news broke, I thought Brit Hume, Fox News’ chief political analyst, gave the best report of Pelley’s reaction to being fired by his new boss, Weiss. I respect Hume for his nearly half century in journalism, print and television, including some 20 years at ABC News.
In his assessment of “the boss is still the boss,” he framed Pelley’s departure in “a reminder of the hierarchy in television news — that while talent and on-air presence matter, the ultimate authority rests with the executive leadership.
“Personalities can be replaced, and star power has limits.” He warned that in the end, “no one is bigger than the corporation” — meaning that even the most prominent journalists must follow the chain of command when push comes to shove.
The day Weiss made the announcement on 60 Minutes, she asked 60 Minutes staffers: “Why do you think the country thinks you’re biased?“
During the TIMES interview, the disbelieving Pelley said he would have asked her “What’s your metric? Why do you think so? Do you have a poll? Is there market research?”
As a longtime observer of leftist bias in the news, I didn’t find Pelley’s disbelief of the existence of bias at 60 Minutes unusual.
In reporting the Minneapolis shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent, he balked at the suggestion that he noted that the car was moving toward the officer, furiously rejecting that that’s what happened.
And certainly, he should have remembered in 2020 when Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes told Trump, “There was no real evidence of that,” when he said that his campaign was spied upon.
Despite Trump’s insistence that those spying on him had been caught, Stahl boastfully stated, “This is 60 Minutes, and we can’t put on things we can’t verify,” and continued to dismiss Trump’s claim.
Trump was referring to Special Counsel John Durham’s finding that the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower, and the White House, and the bias Stahl chose not to accept it.
Surely, Pelley was aware that just three percent of journalists identify as Republican, according to a study by Syracuse University. In addition, some 90 percent donate to Democrats.
That shows up in reporting in many ways – by tone and inflection in one’s voice or, in print, choice of words in a headline, or allowing yourself to insert opinion in a news article.
Noting Pelley’s tears and incessant chewing of his eyeglass frames during the TIMES interview, Gerard Baker, editor at large of the Wall Street Journal, wrote, “Scott Pelley’s hysterical self-indulgence illustrates what’s gone wrong with the American news media.” Why just 28 percent of Americans trust the media.
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
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