CBS News thinks the crown jewel of its news division is "60 Minutes," the alleged gold standard of investigative journalism on television. But when it comes to politics, their coverage isn't just slanted. It's more like a wrecked bus laying on its side, wheels spinning in the air.
Their stilted editing of a Kamala Harris interview weeks before the election caused Donald Trump to sue last year over the potential harm to his candidacy. By that standard, Trump could sue lots of newscasters and documentarians who slice and dice presidential contenders to try and persuade voters.
The Wall Street Journal reported the owners of CBS at Paramount Global in recent days offered $15 million to settle the suit, but Team Trump wants more than $25 million and is also seeking an apology from CBS News.
You can laugh when the Journal added CBS has said the broadcast was "not doctored or deceitful." When the full interview was released, you could see it was carefully cooked and sliced like lamb chops. Every segment "60 Minutes" has done on Joe Biden or Kamala Harris can be presumed to be doctored for maximum positive impact.
Partisanship is the real sticking point in these lawsuits, and needling the partisans is clearly a Trump strategy. The die-hard Democrats at CBS don't want to apologize to Trump because that looks like surrender in the 10-year war they have been waging on him.
The Left was furious at ABC News for settling with Trump for $15 million so the rest of us couldn't read internal ABC emails. George Stephanopoulos was clearly wrong to assert Trump was "found liable for rape" in the E. Jean Carroll suit, but the truth is no priority when the objective is to Get Trump.
In the midst of this lawsuit, the partisans of "60 Minutes" have gone on an anti-conservative tear this year:
On Feb. 16, mere days after Vice President JD Vance went into the Munich Security Conference and denounced European censorship regimes, Sharyn Alfonsi produced a report bizarrely extolling the virtues of German censorship.
On the same show, Scott Pelley aired a self-righteous attack on Trump and Elon Musk upending the U.S. Agency for International Development. "It's too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution," he lectured.
On Feb. 23, Bill Whitaker puffed up leftist comedian John Oliver, who raged that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is being bribed by his friends when they have taken him on vacations: "I can prove that to you by offering this guy a million dollars a year to get the (bleep) off the Supreme Court. That should be a crime."
On April 27, Pelley closed the program with an impassioned editorial defending his boss Bill Evans, who resigned because according to Pelley, in the midst of the Trump lawsuit, "Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires."
On May 4, Pelley played up the bravery of Marc Elias, the partisan Democrat lawyer who worked for Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 and spread all the unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Trump being in collusion with the Russian government to steal the election. Lawyers like Elias were being persecuted by a vengeful Trump, and you can't paint Team Hillary as being vengeful with all their phony Russiagate attacks.
At "60 Minutes," it never mattered how many perfumed valentines they offered to help Barack Obama. They consider themselves the embodiment of journalistic "independence." They think "honest journalism" is defined by ferociously attacking Trump and other people who are impeding progress by preventing the Democrats from running everything.
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