REASON’S MICHAEL MOYNIHAN AND MATT WELCH ON SCOTT PELLEY’S CRASH AND BURN:
Later in their Fifth Column podcast, Moynihan and Welch discuss the current state of the CBS News:
Moynihan: We have seen this for so long. This pompous, journalistic attitude of, “We are here for the truth.”
It’s like, you’re not here for the f**king truth. You’re here for the truth in some ways; you’re not always here for the truth. And thank God you aren’t. I’m happy that you’re not. I just don’t want you to pretend that you’re doing something you’re not.
Welch: If you are here for the truth, you don’t say–because it’s not true–that Bari Weiss was sent to destroy 60 Minutes.*
Moynihan: Or you don’t say to Donald Trump in an interview, as Lesley Stahl did, “You can’t tell that that’s his laptop.”
Are you a journalist? Are you brain-dead?
All you have to do is look at the emails and email the person in the email and say, “Did you get this email from Hunter Biden?” “Yeah, I did.”
[Then] it’s his f**king laptop.
One email. Do five of them. Do ten of them. Take ten minutes.
But they didn’t want the story. They didn’t want it because it crashed into their worldview, and they thought it would help Donald Trump. And that’s not what journalism is about.
“It’s going to help Donald Trump.” Who f**king cares? It’s a story. Go after the story.
And everyone abdicated their responsibility on that. And she did that on camera to Donald Trump: “Well, we can’t tell. There’s no way of verifying it.”
Yes, there’s a way of verifying it.
You guys go to the Uyghur camps in China–and congratulations, you do great work on a lot of stuff–but you couldn’t verify it? You didn’t want to verify that.
That’s fine. But don’t pretend you’re speaking truth to power in a broad way. You’re not.
* As X personality “Jarvis” notes:
Political talk today is characterized by CATASTROPHIZING. Your enemies will put you in CAMPS. Democracy is ENDING. Every election is THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIMES. Scott Pelley being sacked isn’t the mere natural outcome of calling his new boss a murderer and generally acted like a petulant dickhead in front of God and everyone — it’s the END OF LIBERAL MEDIA AS WE KNOW IT just like it was when Acosta and Lemon and a million other replacement level talking heads were shown the door.
Weiss isn’t “destroying” 60 Minutes, but technology and market forces rendered the original three TV networks no longer a monopoly for news, a topic that Geoffrey Ingersoll explores in “The Truth Behind Scott Pelley’s Epic CBS Meltdown:”
Pelley’s highly choreographed meltdown is more than likely his way of resigning so that he can launch a substack or his own podcast venture amid the kind of controversy that gets an early boost in viewers.
Yes, it really is that cynical and contrived.
Underneath it, however, is a real anxiety.
Scrape away the high-minded f*ckery, the self-flattering elitism, and you lay bare a rather coherent theory of mind.
Pelley is right. Something is dying. They’re losing their grip on the (un)reality machine. They see their rapidly dissolving ability to include and exclude lines of inquiry and it freaks them out. New people with new motivations will now be deciding which stories are legitimate and, importantly, how to cover them.
Pelley’s composure might be well practiced, intact, stalwart, but he is almost certainly shrieking on the inside.
Tranquility Base here, the Ego has landed. Was Pelley doing an Olbermann? Does he think he’s Cronkite? William Holden in Network? Olbermann left MSNBC 15 years ago. Cronkite retired 45 years ago. Network debuted in movie theaters 50 years ago. The era of mass media was over a long time ago.
So what could be Pelley’s next gig?
That cable opinion network is a perfect fit in many ways: Pelley ripped for claiming he was ‘in combat’ in Afghanistan and Iraq after CBS News firing.
Pelley was fired from the long-running CBS News show on Tuesday following a bitter clash with the network’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and new “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley, who first joined CBS News in 1989 and did not serve in the military, quickly raised eyebrows with a statement he gave following his termination.
“I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast,” Pelley, who has reported from several war zones in his career, told The New York Times.
As the successor to MSNBC, M-SNOW has a lot of experience with former network anchormen who cosplay as soldiers:
