OPINION:
CBS’s “60 Minutes” was widely regarded not long ago as the gold standard of broadcast journalism. Regrettably, not so much anymore.
With the luxury of long-form, in-depth reporting rather than the typical mainstream media hit-and-run headline-and-sound-bite journalism, “60 Minutes” presented thorough, thoughtful and evenhanded reports on controversial topics.
It still does from time to time. On Dec. 15, “60 Minutes” aired a pair of riveting reports: one about life in Syria, now that it’s no longer under the boot of deposed dictator Bashar Assad; the other exposing how darknet sites powered by artificial intelligence are enabling the deepfake “pornification” of photos of teenage girls.
Those reports represent what journalism should be.
In the past several years, “60 Minutes” has all too often aired reports with a left-wing bias nearly indistinguishable from what you would find on MSNBC.
This past Sunday, correspondent Scott Pelley narrated a 13-minute segment titled “28 Days” about the first four weeks of President Trump’s second term.
The show’s opening tease — with its trademark stopwatch ticking, in this case almost as if it were a time bomb — previewed the ominous tone of the report this way: “It’s too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution, but in just 28 days, he’s reinterpreted the 14th Amendment and closed agencies that Congress mandated by law.”
It was downhill from there, beginning with two federal contractors lamenting how they had been dismissed with little notice from their jobs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID was the first federal department targeted by Mr. Trump’s and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency for downsizing and ridding waste.
Mr. Pelley devoted not so much as a single word to the widely publicized list of USAID programs that squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on wasteful and fraudulent programs abroad, many promoting radical diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and LGBTQ agendas. He then doubled down by letting leftist Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck dismiss what he called Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Musk’s “claims of fraud” to be just “fig leafs” to mask a power grab.
Mr. Pelley, a former “CBS Evening News” anchor, also failed to identify one of the two distraught dismissed USAID consultants he interviewed as Kristina Drye, a speechwriter for President Biden’s USAID chief, Samantha Power, hardly an objective source.
Both were examples of blatant bias by omission.
The “60 Minutes” producers and CBS clearly learned nothing from Mr. Trump’s lawsuit filed against them in late October over the program’s deceptive editing of Vice President Kamala Harris’ preelection interview.
The release of an unedited transcript and the raw footage of the Oct. 7 interview, as required by the Federal Communications Commission after Mr. Trump’s complaint, revealed that it had been edited to make Ms. Harris’ answers to correspondent Bill Whitaker’s questions sound more concise and coherent than they were.
Mr. Trump has sued CBS for $20 billion, accusing it of “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of the Nov. 5 presidential election in Ms. Harris’ favor — albeit unsuccessfully.
All that called to mind a masterstroke move by Mr. Trump four years earlier. On Oct. 22, 2020, he released on Facebook his own 37-minute videotaped version of a highly contentious “60 Minutes” preelection interview three days before its network airing. That presumably was intended to preempt any chance of correspondent Lesley Stahl excerpting and presenting questions and answers out of context to make him look bad.
That was hot on the heels of Ms. Stahl’s “60 Minutes” report, “Inside the Lincoln Project’s Campaign Against President Trump,” which, on Oct. 11, 2020, portrayed the rabidly anti-Trump group of Republican in-name-only grifters in the most favorable possible light. CBS should have been required to file a report with the Federal Election Commission for that in-kind contribution to Mr. Biden’s campaign a little more than three weeks before the presidential election.
On Nov. 8, 2020, five days after Mr. Biden’s election, Mr. Whitaker’s report dismissive of Republican charges of voter fraud in Philadelphia was shameless in its one-sidedness and anti-Trump bias.
The liberal, pro-Democrat slant of “60 Minutes” has not been directed solely at Mr. Trump. On April 5, 2021, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi presented a hit piece on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, pointedly accusing the Republican of a “pay-for-play” campaign contribution scheme involving state COVID-19 vaccination contracts.
The report was deceptively edited to omit almost all of Mr. DeSantis’ lengthy, detailed explanation at a news conference attended by Ms. Alfonsi, at which he thoroughly refuted the specifics of her accusation.
That detailed explanation ended up on the cutting room floor at “60 Minutes,” but conservative podcaster Dave Rubin used video footage from The Florida Channel, which carried the news conference live, to show how egregiously misleading Ms. Alfonsi’s report was.
It was another case of bias by omission.
Ms. Alfonsi’s attempted takedown of Mr. DeSantis contrasted sharply with a 12½-minute glowing puff-piece profile of Sen. Angus King of Maine by correspondent Jon Wertheim that aired on Jan. 10, 2021. Mr. King, now in his third term, claims to be an independent but caucuses with Democrats and votes almost invariably in lockstep with the ultraliberal Democratic Party line, as I documented in great detail in this space on Feb. 3.
Nor is the liberal bias of “60 Minutes” limited to politicians it favors or disfavors.
Mr. Pelley’s Jan. 2, 2023, report on global warming (aka climate change) was apocalyptic in hand-wringing. He made no mention of the innumerable times the climate alarmists have been completely wrong in their doomsday predictions dating back to 1967, as Zerohedge.com painstakingly detailed in a report just two days earlier, “2022, Same Sh**, Different Year: 55 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.”
I could include several other examples of the liberal bias of “60 Minutes,” but I won’t belabor the point. Still, we should mention correspondent Steve Kroft’s Dec. 11, 2011, softball interview with President Obama. It was Mr. Kroft’s seventh “60 Minutes” interview of the liberal Illinois Democrat in less than three years and the program’s (at least) 11th since Mr. Obama first emerged on the national political scene in 2004. No other president has enjoyed that kind of “man crush” from Mr. Kroft or “60 Minutes” in its 57 seasons on the air.
It’s regrettable that “60 Minutes,” once the gold standard of broadcast news, has become liberal fool’s gold. The public’s trust in the legacy media as a whole has cratered, with an October Gallup poll showing just 31% of respondents expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly.” Some 36% of U.S. adults have no trust in the media, and 33% of Americans expressed “not very much” confidence.
As a result, more people than ever are getting their news from other sources, and that’s due in no small part to “60 Minutes.”
• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.
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