CBS News has fired Scott Pelley. The new regime at CBS News is praising Pelley, probably disingenuously:
[New CBS News head Bari] Weiss nevertheless praised Pelley’s body of work and highlighted several of his recent reports for “60 Minutes.”
“That unfortunate outcome does not discount from the amazing contributions and work that Scott Pelley has done for CBS and for ‘60 Minutes’ over the course of his career,” Weiss said.
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CBS News president Tom Cibrowski echoed Weiss’s remarks, calling Pelley “an integral part of ‘60 Minutes,’ the ‘CBS Evening News’ and this entire news organization for decades.”“His incredible body of work … will always be part of the history of CBS News,” Cibrowski said.
To be blunt: bullshit. 60 Minutes has been a disgrace for a long time. It is a dishonest, unreliable purveyor of leftist tropes, and hasn’t been anything else for decades. Rathergate is its most famous fraud, but there have been many others. Prior to Rathergate, we exposed another now-forgotten 60 Minutes scandal. They presented a guest and a document that supposedly showed that the George W. Bush administration was after Iraq’s oil reserves. That was a common leftist theme of the moment, although no one ever tried to explain why, if the U.S. was trying to commandeer oil, we would attack the only oil-possessing country with a formidable army. How about invading, say, Kuwait?
But we tracked down the document that 60 Minutes relied on, and it turned out it came from the Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce had a publication about the world’s oil resources, and there was a page for each country. There was a page for Canada, for Kuwait, for many others–and for Iraq. That was it. It had nothing to do with America’s foreign policy or with the Bush administration’s invasion of that country.
Others have chronicled many of Pelley’s misdeeds on 60 Minutes, but I want to close with a Power Line exclusive–a story that I had forgotten until I searched Pelley’s name on this site. It goes back to 2008, when Pelley thought he had a scoop: Karl Rove, at that time the bete noir of the Democratic Party, had hired a woman named Jill Simpson to spy on a Democratic politician in Alabama back in 2001 and 2002.
I won’t try to rehearse all the details now; you can read the original post (truncated due to a database shift) here, and our 2017 follow-up here. Suffice it to say that poor Ms. Simpson was not a well person, and Pelley engaged in cruelty as well as bad faith in presenting her to the 60 Minutes audience as a reliable source. In fact, there is zero evidence that Simpson ever met or spoke to Karl Rove.
I will quote from that 2017 post the moment when Simpson’s disability became patent, and Pelley had to make a decison as a “reporter”:
In her 60 Minutes interview, Simpson claimed to have been Rove’s secret agent in Alabama. She said that during Siegelman’s term as governor of Alabama, Rove had asked her to follow Siegelman around and try to get photographs of him “in a compromising sexual position” with one of his aides. This led to one of the great moments in recent broadcast history:
60 Minutes’s Scott Pelley: Were you surprised that Rove made this request?
Simpson: No.
Pelley: Why not?
Simpson: I had had other requests for intelligence before.
Pelley: From Karl Rove?
Simpson: Yes.
Pelley was at a crossroads: He knew that either (1) he was on the verge of uncovering a whole series of Rovian plots, the stuff of which Pulitzers are made, or (2) he was talking to a lunatic. Intuiting, no doubt, which way the conversation was likely to go, Pelley discreetly chose not to inquire further.
I remain proud of the fact that Rove himself described my dissection of Pelley’s 60 Minutes fraud as “definitive.”
The point is that 60 Minutes has never been a legitimate news source. It has always been a craven water-carrier for the Democratic Party. And Scott Pelley is one of its most disgraceful “journalists.”
60 Minutes has had decent ratings over the years. Why? Well, there is a sucker born every minute. But mostly, I suspect, because it follows NFL football, television’s most popular programming, every Sunday evening. My guess is that half of 60 Minutes’ alleged viewers are football fans who forgot to turn off the TV.
Good riddance to Scott Pelley. Bari Weiss and her colleagues should not feel obliged to offer false praise to 60 Minutes or any of its personalities. The history of that show is disgraceful. The sooner it follows Pelley into the garbage dump of history, the better.
