Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
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?More
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.
Our country’s only independent check-and-balance on government — the dominant, biased (read: corrupt) corporate media — has proven to be the seed to our country’s current free-fall and subsequent demise.
Maybe, the MSM was always biased, even corrupt at times, and the advent of multiple social media outlets online are now the real check-and-balance. Note: It’s kind of humorous when the news channels run ads about how trustworthy they are after each debacle.
This post-modern age has no absolute truth, universal morality and ultimate accountability.
What matters with moral relativists and materialists is power to achieve their own will.
Men believe themselves to be free to do what they want and be what they want.
Psalm 2: 1-3 describes the disposition of those who want to usurp God –
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.”
Bailey claims to be able to read Kamala Harris’ mind. There is no other way to determine her motives in plagiarizing were “not malicious”.
In the same way, James Comey read Hillary Clinton’s mind in order to determine that she did not use her illegal server with “criminal intent”.
Perhaps Bailey and Comey could team up as a mind reading act. I’m sure they’d be the toast of the town in Las Vegas.
Good insights, just an attempt to justify their actions and avoid prosecuting.
The MSM is clearly the mouthpiece of the DNC and when Democrats control the White House, they are then the government’s mouthpiece. We need to give them a new name to capture that alignment. Main Stream Media does not convey who the really are. Too bad Pravda is already taken.
Propaganda spreads ideas to further a cause and hurt those who oppose it.
Those of us who are older remember a time when the press did try to be objective. Call it the Walter Cronkite era. You can make a strong argument that even then it tended to show a bias in favor of the Democrats, but it was less obvious than now. However, this was not the norm for most of American history, and it was likely never the norm internationally. Up until the early part of the 20th Century the press was stridently in favor of one side or the other, often reflected in the name of the paper such as the Aardvarkville Democrat or the East Aardvarkville Republican.
So, we are back to an era of yellow journalism, which you could argue is more normal than the Cronkite era. Of course, it means no one really trusts the media as anything but a propaganda mill, though you might prefer one load of propaganda over another. If the media ever decides it wants to try to play it straight again it can do so, but it will take years – a generation or more, before enough old people die off and enough young people are around who don’t remember this partisanship for people to ever trust them again.
Not so long ago, media bias had to be more concealed or even subliminal because the reading and viewing public thought on a higher level and wouldn’t go for flat-out propaganda. The success of leftist-inspired agitation about the Vietnam War marked a turning point.
It would be helpful to remove persuasion from reporting the news event. The communicator may also need to state his purpose and offer a counter viewpoint to represent the issue more fully.
…or the “60 Minutes” story on DeSantis in 2021. This from a CNN piece in April 2021:
“The problem is that, in the wake of the ’60 Minutes’ report, multiple Democratic elected officials have come out to debunk the tie between the donation and Publix distributing the vaccine.
Palm Beach County Mayor Dave Kerner, a Democrat, said that the news program had run ‘intentionally false’ information because, he insisted, the producers knew that the county, not the governor, had been the one to request the Publix partnership.”
Watching “60 Minutes” has become a waste of time.
The fact that so many citizens still listen to, watch and believe the MSM is disheartening, not to mention that it is the main reason this country is so divided. There are perfect examples of this in my own family.
When I was growing up, my father read three different NYC newspapers daily to get their differing perspectives. He could have stuck with one, but went the extra mile. Despite the Left’s overwhelming media dominance these days, people who care to take the time can find the other side easily. So why don’t they typically do so? Is some addiction keeping them from boldly being citizens?
A couple of points to make:
1) Media bias occurred far before Trump. One of his legacies will be to label it as “Fake News” which it clearly is. It is about time, someone with the gumption of Trump call out the media. Victor’s elaboration on this point in today’s editorial adds more FACTS to the point. Well done!
2) Gallup recently released their poll reflecting that trust in the media had fallen to an all-time low. Gee, I wonder why?
“Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Romans 3:13-18
So, you want a man who has been convicted of 34 felony counts, convicted of mistreating a woman, would almost certainly be in jail for significant time for an attempted coup d’état if the legal system had been allowed to play out.
If Mike Pence hadn’t ‘saved the day’, We would have been in the middle weeks of chaos the likely result of which would have been the election of a man for which the electorate did not vote for.
And that’s okay with you?
So, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Stacy Abrams would be in prison now for protesting the balloting, proclaiming they had been cheated and acted to rectify an injustice?
The evidence for mistreating that woman was so lacking that she could not report where and when it happened.
Likewise, the felony counts are still in dispute, the matter is not settled.
Democrats should vote for Trump because he will not let men who claim that they are women use the women’s restroom and play on women’s sport teams. If this was the only reason to vote for Trump, then all Democrats and Americans should do so.
Make America Sane Again – Vote for Trump
To get to the point of your question, YES; Trump as POTUS is quite okay with me. In fact he got my vote just today.
Nice try to bring up all the bogus lawfare suits that we are seeing desintegrate under real scrutiny of the NY Superior Court and appeals. Most Trump supporters see these for what they truly are, election interference because the cesspool of the left fears Trump.
Not one of these would have been brought, including E Jean Carrol’s “she said he said accusation”, if Trump had just walked away after 2020.
Am sending the critique of the Times Gaza testimonials to our son in Geneva (he had sent the Times article to us, urging us to read it).
The “News” media has always had trouble with “Objective Truth”. The thousands of newspapers had to woo subscribers to stay in business and those who failed went bankrupt. Of those who lost their jobs most were back office, printers, and delivery personnel. News print, magazines, and the book industry all suffered from one technology, first the radio, then the television, then computers (printing as a business was greatly changed by the new computer controlled printers), and finally the Internet. Changes in the last are still happening and it is difficult to know where it is all headed. Still, news as an industry has had its problems with honesty in reporting, nothing new here. I remember when CBS’s Sixty minutes first appeared in 1968 and the legacy of the older generation of newscasters kept it relatively honest. That light has gone out for good, never to return. The battle is now for new subscribers to new Internet sites.