Scott Pelley treated his bosses at CBS News precisely the way journalists employed by that outlet have treated Americans for the past 80 years.
When viewers see an event, public figure, or news story from a perspective outside of the perimeters of their narrow one, CBS journalists feel threatened and lash out. Even (especially?) a contradiction of facts infuriates ideologically crusading journalists. (RELATED: 60 Minutes Is Burning. Bring Marshmallows.)
Recall the condescension of Lesley Stahl in her see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil denialism of the Hunter Biden laptop in her 2020 interview of President Trump. Dan Rather, so many years before, seconded the “fake but accurate” characterization by The New York Times of a 60 Minutes hatchet job on President George W. Bush that killed the anchorman’s career at the network.
Now one of Rather’s many successors — note that Rather succeeded just two CBS News lead anchors — similarly leaves the network on account of Ron Burgundy-level pomposity.
Pelley accused his boss, CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, of coming to the network “to kill it.” He told the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, “She is murdering 60 Minutes.”
He called the credentials of Bilton, whose resume boasts three books, a decade-plus each at Vanity Fair and The New York Times, and scripts for HBO documentaries and a forthcoming Martin Scorsese movie, “slender.” He further told Bilton that he would “never be welcome here.”
In what profession does one get to tell the boss he is not welcome in the workplace he oversees and say about a higher boss that she seeks to kill their enterprise, and then remain employed?
It will take more than one firing to fix CBS.
Predictably (maybe Pelley wanted this), Bilton fired Pelley. Just as predictably, the two camps give competing and contradictory stories of what occurred in the contentious meetings between them. Here, again, someone from CBS gets the story wrong.
It will take more than one firing to fix CBS. Problems at the network go back to before it even broadcast to television audiences. The network’s most venerated newsman set the tone by acting as a left-wing propagandist. George Clooney depicted Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck as crusading against Senator Joe McCarthy. He did that, but more broadly, he used CBS as a vehicle to attack anti-Communists.
Consider his report the day after Laurence Duggan, a former U.S. State Department official during the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, leaped or was thrown — more likely from someone named Boris than John — out of a skyscraper window in Manhattan. He told his audience:
Tonight, the headlines are shouting: “Duggan Named in Spy Case.” Who named him? [conservative journalist] Isaac Don Levine, who said he was quoting Whittaker Chambers. And who denies it? Whittaker Chambers. Tonight, Representative [Karl] Mundt says: “The Duggan affair is a close book so far as the House Committee is concerned.” The representative from South Dakota also says he is thinking of making recommendations for changing the procedure at committee hearings, maybe even giving the accused person the right to be heard before the Committee issues a report. The members of the Committee who have done this thing upon such slight and wholly discredited testimony may now consult their actions and their consciences.
Murrow knowingly lied to his audience.
Chambers had accused Duggan. So had fellow ex-spies Hede Massing and Elizabeth Bentley.
Not that their “wholly discredited testimony” needed affirmation, but years later, Duggan appeared as “Frank” and “19” in the decrypted Soviet spy cables. As demonstrated by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev in The Haunted Wood, Duggan also appears in the files of the Soviet Union in Russia that depict him as providing Soviet intelligence information during the 1930s and 1940s on such sensitive subjects as American military plans for an invasion of Italy, U.S. Navy objections to fulfilling industrial orders from the Soviet Union, and discussions on the prospects of peace between the president and his advisors.
Consequently, Murrow omitted his friendship, dating back more than a decade, with Duggan. This friendship owed in large part to an attempt by a group that included Duggan and Murrow to establish an international summer school in Moscow with the involvement of Stalin’s regime during the 1930s.
Why did Murrow get Duggan so wrong? Why did Rather get George W. Bush so wrong? Why did Stahl get the Hunter Biden laptop story so wrong?
Like Scott Pelley, they allowed their political sympathies to infect their reporting. Their errors, tellingly, all injure one side of the political divide (Is it shocking that Democrats attempted to recruit Murrow to run for Senate in New York or that John Kennedy appointed him to his administration?).
It looks as though the new CBS regime hopes to institute a more balanced approach. To paraphrase Murrow, good night and good luck with that.
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