Catherine Dubuque 🐉 がリツイート
After being fired from CBS, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley yesterday said that “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified.”
Those are remarkable claims for which Pelley presented no evidence. Indeed, it would be extraordinary for CBS to demand such things of a correspondent, either verbally or in writing, given the reputational risk to the network.
A more likely explanation is that Pelley disagreed with someone at CBS and then declared a difference of opinion to be a demand to lie. Support for this interpretation comes from the fact that he claimed Tuesday that CBS’s new management, led by Bari Weiss, was trying to kill “60 Minutes,” something for which he also did not provide evidence.
Moreover, the accusation makes no sense. CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss took the job to rebuild CBS News, not to wreck it, and a ruined “60 Minutes” would hurt her. Paramount’s owners did not pay billions for the network to burn its best asset for spite. So the simpler reading is that Pelley is the one stretching the truth.
Doing so appears to be a habit for Pelley. He told The New York Times, “I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq,” but being in a combat zone as a journalist is not the same as being “in combat.” The remark is yet more evidence of Pelley’s propensity to exaggerate to the point of lying.
For decades, mainstream liberal journalists have displayed remarkable levels of arrogance, even as they get major stories wrong.
Consider the case of CBS News’ former anchor Dan Rather. In the fall of 2004, two months before the election, Rather presented documents purporting to show favoritism in George W. Bush’s National Guard service. Experts called them forgeries. CBS apologized: “We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry,” Rather said. On air, he added, “I want to say, personally and directly, I’m sorry.”
But then, a decade later, Rather told Variety he still stands “100 percent” behind the report and reframed the apology.
Or consider NBC’s Katie Couric. In her 2016 documentary “Under the Gun,” editors inserted roughly eight to nine seconds of silence after she asked Virginia gun owners how to keep guns from felons and terrorists without background checks, making them look stumped. The raw audio revealed that they answered immediately.
Couric’s first instinct was to defend what she did, saying she was “very proud of the film.” Only after sustained backlash did she apologize.
In her 2021 memoir “Going There,” Couric admitted she cut Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s harshest anthem-kneeling comments from her 2016 interview. Ginsburg had said kneeling players showed “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life, which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from.”
NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in the spring of 2020, aired a clip of Attorney General Bill Barr that omitted part of his answer, misleading the public.
When Catherine Herridge interviewed Barr for CBS Evening News, she asked what history would say about his decision to drop the case against a former National Security Advisor to President Trump, Michael Flynn. The Obama administration’s FBI had illegally targeted Flynn for entrapment and prosecution. Barr replied that ”history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”
"Meet the Press'" anchor at the time, Chuck Todd, said on air that Barr “didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job.’” But “Meet the Press” had left out the second part of Barr’s answer to Herridge, in which he said, “But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law.”
The safeguards the journalism profession built against error did not work when it mattered. The corrections, the editors, the fact-checkers, and the standards desks all sat in place while the press got the border, trans medicine, climate, the sixth extinction, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, Covid and much else wrong. Gerth described how reporters sought to “shoot the messenger” rather than grapple with evidence contradicting the Russia collusion narrative...
x.com/shellenberger/…
Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism and to read the full article!
English
