Scott Pelley is the pompous windbag of 60 Minutes. Ted Knight played a character like Pelley for laughs in days of old on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Pelley amped up the character and drained it of humor. He is beyond satire. An insufferable fool, he plays himself seriously.
But he’s worse than that. Jonthan Leaf explains why in the Washington Free Beacon column “Scott Pelley isn’t a serious journalist.” Leaf focuses on one fraudulent story retailed by Pelley on which Leaf himself has become an expert based on his own work. It takes a little patience with the details. On my point, however, Leaf puts it this way:
Pelley is a classic talking-head—someone who started in television and whose whole career has been forged within it. This is the world that the movie Broadcast News depicts. Someone handsome and deep-voiced appears on camera. Others do most or all of the writing and the research….
In Britain, news anchors have traditionally been called “newsreaders.” That’s because this is what they are. Their job is to make sure that their hair is coiffed when they read from the teleprompter. Pelley was a male bimbo: a himbo.
Leaf’s column is prefaced by this editor’s introduction:
CBS News fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley last week after he berated his bosses and accused them of “murdering” the news magazine and betraying journalistic principles. In the report below, the author, playwright, and journalist Jonathan Leaf holds up a mirror to reveal the sort of axe-grinding journalism 60 Minutes has been producing for decades. This piece first appeared here in a modified version at Jonathan Leaf’s Substack.
Read the whole thing here.
