“60 Minutes”

Monday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 4/27/26

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Most of these notes, as you may well expect, involve the latest Trump assassination attempt.

1. Barack Obama is trying to surpass Donald Trump as the most obnoxious former President ever. At least Trump had the excuse that he was trying to get elected to another term. Obama has no excuses. He wrote on “X”: “Although we don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner, it’s incumbent upon all us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy. It’s also a sobering reminder of the courage and sacrifice that U.S. Secret Service Agents show every day. I’m grateful to them – and thankful that the agent who was shot is going to be okay.”

Nobody has any doubts about what the motives of the shooter were, and the message he sent out shortly before his attempt to kill the President and as many of his aides and Cabinet as he could made those motives clear. So this is going to be his party’s tactic for ducking responsibility, is it? Gaslighting? (See the shameless Rep. Raskin pretend he has no idea what kind of rhetoric his party has used against President Trump.) Obama’s message is also notable in expressing concern for the Secret Service agent but none for the would-be assassin’s main target. Apparently it was too difficult for Obama to say he was also thankful that Trump, his wife and others were “going to be okay.” That sentiment, after all, would upset the Democratic base that wants Trump dead.

The longer I get to observe Barack Obama, the more indefensible his character seems to be. If Jimmy Carter, as he boasted, was among our most accomplished ex-Presidents ever (well-behind Herbert Hoover, however), Obama has to rank as among the most destructive, right down there with John Tyler, who joined Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy Cabinet.

2. How can this happen? NYPD Officer James Giovansanti’s pickup truck has been caught on camera 547 times in Staten Island since 2022, with 187 camera-issued tickets in 2025 alone. The cop has accumulated $36,650.02 in fines. Apparently Giovansanti is a piker compared to NYC’s reckless driving champion, someone in Brooklyn whose tickets total up to over $60,000, but the Staten Island scofflaw is a law enforcement officer. He should have been terminated years ago. [Pointer: JutGory]

3. The hot topic for the Trump Deranged isn’t that the President was nearly murdered, but that he was mean to Norah O’Donnell on “Sixty Minutes” less than 24 hours later. During a Sunday interview, O’Donnell read to Trump’s face the most direct part of the failed assassin’s so-called “manifesto,” the section I called “the key quote in the message” yesterday: “I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me.I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Then:

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The President’s “60 Minutes” Interview

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

President Trump sat down for a full interview with “60 Minutes” yesterday, and was grilled by CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell (as I was once, though not on that show). The transcript and the video are here. Under the new regime of CBS News Czar (“Editor-in-Chief”) Bari Weiss, there were no deceptively edited sections as in the infamous and unethical (and, I believe, illegal) Kamala Harris interview a year ago when the network switched around her responses to try to deceive voters into believing that the Democrat isn’t, you know, a babbling idiot.

This post’s purpose isn’t to critique O’Donnell’s questions. She was appropriately respectful, aggressive and professional except that her facial expressions conveyed her hostility, which is unprofessional but now common practice among Axis broadcast journalists. The shot above was typical: she looked at the President of the United States as if he were a six-foot talking cockroach. Nor am I going to praise or criticize the substance of Trump’s responses, though I note that he showed an excellent knowledge of American Presidential history when he pronounced Joe Biden as our Worst President Ever.

It is simply to point out that the Trump Derangement narrative that this President is mentally failing and as cognitively disabled as Joe Biden (“Just in a different way” as one sufferer told me on Halloween) is either delusional or deliberately dishonest. The interview was slam-dunk proof of that, and yet this slander/libel is Axis cant now. I regard the claim as evidence of a genuine disruption of thinking ability. Bias makes you stupid, and in this case, bias is making these poor people ridiculous.

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Paramount/CBS Pays For Its Unethical Election Interference: Good!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

It looks like the settlement will amount to around 16 million dollars when all is tallied up, more than what ABC paid for George Stephanopoulos repeatedly (but not maliciously, oh no, never that!) calling Donald Trump a “rapist” on national TV. Several cynics were telling me today that this was “a drop in the bucket” for Paramount—it doesn’t matter. The settlement is an admission of wrongdoing, and what CBS and “60 Minutes” did by stealth editing a Kamala Harris interview late in the Presidential campaign to make her sound like less of an idiot was wrong, another “enemy of the people” act, and a blatant attempt to mislead voters and support the Democratic Party under the guise of journalism.

More important than the symbolism of the money perhaps is CBS’s promise to install a mandatory new rule requiring the network to promptly release full, unedited transcripts of future Presidential candidate interviews. It is the “Trump Rule.” That a television news division had to be forced into institutionalizing such transparency tells us all we need to know about the dismal state of broadcast journalism.

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At Last, Some Accountability For the “60 Minutes” Attempted Election Interference

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Bill Owens, the long-time executive producer of “60 Minutes,” has announced his impending resignation from the iconic CBS Sunday news program.

Good.

His stated reason was that “over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience. So, having defended this show — and what we stand for — from every angle, over time with everything I could, I am stepping aside so the show can move forward,” His memo was obtained by The New York Times, meaning that it was leaked.

If Owens had any integrity, he would have resigned in shame after the hard evidence emerged that the news magazine under his watch had deliberately sought to deceive some viewers (the lazy, inattentive ones) while pleasing others… the “by any means necessary” progressives seeking to foist a babbling fool off on the voting public as a competent potential President to succeed the resident babbling fool, Joe Biden.)

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“Reason” Thinks The “60 Minutes” Deceptive Edit of the Harris Interview Was Just Fine [Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

It’s hard for me to use a publication as a news source after it does something this ethically obtuse. I often find Reason, the libertarian magazine and website, insightful and useful, especially since the Volokh Conspiracy hangs out there now. But the site has not one but two essays claiming that CBS and “60 Minutes” were “vindicated” by the unedited transcript of Harris’s infamous interview, and all I can say in response is, “What’s the matter with them?”

Well, not all I can say. In an earlier post I pointed out how egregiously CBS cherry-picked relatively coherent pieces of Harris’s typically garbled responses, indeed taking middle-of-the-answer sentences and then middle-of-the-sentence portions to make Harris sound less like the dim-witted empty suit than she is. Jacob Sullum frames his “It isn’t what it is ” piece by repeating Trump’s rant about how the editing was “illegal” and should lose CBS its license. Yawn. Gee, Trump exaggerates. He was nonetheless correct that it was attempted election interference and “fake news.”

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CBS Faces the Music For Its “60 Minutes” Cheat

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

CBS, only a month before a Presidential election that was believed to be a toss-up, deliberately used its flagship news magazine show, “60 Minutes,” to throw a lifeline to Kamala Harris. The network was caught red-handed at this, as this admittedly critical coverage clearly shows…

Not long after CBS’s flagrant attempt at election interference, NBC did its own dirty work, deliberately violating the FCC’s Equal Time regulation to allow Kamala Harris the equivalent of a campaign ad on Saturday Night Live just three days before the election.

In response to CBS’s cheat, Trump sued the network last year for $10 billion, “alleging” that “the network”60 Minutes” deceptively edited the featured interview with Harris to help her candidacy, or perhaps not to hurt her candidacy is more accurate, since it hid a typical Harris outbreak of gibberish in response to a straightforward question. The lawsuit alleges this because “60 Minutes” did deceptively edit the interview. There is no non-risible argument that it did not. Ethics Alarms issued two posts about this nauseating example of unethical partisan broadcast journalism, here and here. CBS could have backed up its “It isn’t what it is” defense of the incident by releasing the raw transcript of the Harris interview, but it would not, more smoking gun evidence of its attempted election interference by withholding that smoking gun.

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias!” Meets “Nah, The Mainstream Media Isn’t Trying To Rig The Election!” Horror Spectacular, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Please watch all of that report, and then look at this, which I can’t embed, from Fox News. The Joe Concha segment also notes the bizarre recent episode of Tony Dokoupil of CBS being reprimanded for asking tough questions of anti-white racism huckster Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Then there is this: the uncovering of a CBS memo sent to its staff the day after the October 7 terrorist attack on Israeli civilians. The memo was headed, “Standards guidance: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”…

Yikes.

The “some” who believe that a sneak attack on civilians that includes rape and taking hostages as well murder is “justified retaliation” are called “terrorism apologists,” “history ignoramuses” or perhaps just “Democrats.”

Observations on all of this…

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 9/20/22: ” Seeing Bad Stuff In September” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Stop making me defend Scott Pelley! The conservative news media is beating on “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley for what they are calling a “softball” interview, as if every “60 Minutes” interview of a sitting President hasn’t been just as tame, or even tamer. At least Pelley asked Biden about Hunter. The truth is that Americans still prefer to see their Presidents treated with respect and some degree of deference, unless the President is Donald Trump.

It’s funny: the same outlets that are condemning Pelley as a Democratic ally and hack are wondering why Biden’s “handlers” allowed the blithering POTUS to do an interview at all. Of course the conditions demanded for the interview included no follow up questions, and a softball session. And it didn’t matter! Biden’s performance was frightening anyway, and unlike the 2020 interview with Trump, when Leslie Stahl’s clear objective was to attack throughout, the White House couldn’t complain afterwards that the President was sabotaged by a biased journalist. Pelley asked about Joe’s mental fitness, and Biden replied, “Watch me!” And so we did, and have. He continued,

And it ma—, honest to God, that’s all I think. Watch me. If you think I don’t have the energy level or the mental acuity, then — then, you know, that’s one thing. It’s another thing, you just watch and — and, you know, keep my schedule. Do what I’m doing….“I — I think that, you know — I don’t — when I sit down with our NATO allies and keep ’em together, I don’t have ’em saying, ‘Wait a minute, w— how — how old are you? What are you — what say?’ You know, I mean, it’s a matter of, you know, that old expression: The proof of the pudding’s in the eating. I mean, I — I — I respect the fact that people would say, you know, ‘You’re old.’ And — but I think it relates to h— how much energy you have, and whether or not the job you’re doing is one consistent with what any person of any age would be able to do.”

Whether it was Pelley’s intention or not, he ended up doing what ethical journalists are supposed to do: he let the facts speak for themselves.

1. On the topic of social media viewpoint censorship, this:

It takes a lot of chutzpah for YouTube to demonetize a channel because it violates YouTube’s “values” and then sell ads on the same content.

2. Oh please, please let this happen to me! In an open thread at Althouse, a commenter tells this tale,

A friend’s brother lives in Florida. They recently got new neighbors from NY, a husband and wife. A few days after moving in the wife stops over and sits down. She says, “OK, let’s get this out of the way. I am a Democrat and my husband an Independent. What are you?” Non-plussed, he says he is Republican. For the next 15 minutes he was called every expected name- Nazi, racist, etc. IN HIS OWN F-ING HOME!

It’s my contention that the left now knows its flaws are becoming obvious and are overcompensating to hear themselves repeat their failing worldview…

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“Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias”: Roll Over, Ed Murrow!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

CBS News, once symbolized by iconic journalists like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Fred Friendly, is now more appropriately defined by disgraced partisan hack Dan Rather. The past week has demonstrated how far the ethics rot has progressed, or, perhaps, how illusory CBS’s reputation for integrity really was.

In truth, CBS has had a bad month, marked by the Sharon Osbourne debacle on “The Talk.” In that mess, the network allowed the reality show figure turned pundit to be tarred as a racist for not agreeing that Piers Morgan was one when he dared to doubt the sincerity of Princess Meghan, a pretty obvious self-promoting celebrity sociopath. But she’s “of color,” so criticizing her is per se racism according to Woke Law.

Ethics Alarms also flagged the current level of CBS’s trustworthiness in news reporting yesterday, noting,

“…CBS News recently ran a report titled “Asian Americans Battling Bias: Continuing Crisis” in which it stated,  “Nearly 4000 crimes against Asian-Americans have been reported since the start of the pandemic, an increase of about 150 percent in major U.S. cities.” Then it showed  videos of former President Trump calling coronavirus the “Kung Flu.”….In order to inflate the numbers, ratchet up hysteria and attack Trump, [CBS] used numbers from Stop AAPI Hate, led by Arizona State University Professor Aggie Yellow Horse and San Francisco State University Professor Russell Jeung, an “incident” tracker launched in March 2020….The “tracker” counted anonymously reported  incidents, which of course could not be checked or verified. The latest report showed nearly 4,000 of them, most consisting of “verbal harassment” and “shunning.” Those are not “hate crimes.”

But CBS was just getting started. On last night’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an exchange that reporter Sharyn Alfonsi had with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) two weeks ago about how Florida was handling its vaccination program. Here is how the exchange was presented:

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Unethical Quote Of The Week: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

/ Jack Marshall / 43 Comments

“If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.”

—Socialist Democrat and Progressive rock star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in response to “60 Minutes” interviewer Anderson Cooper’s question about her many gaffes and mistatements.

Bingo. There it is, the smoking gun. Proof that Ocasio-Cortez is so self-involved and eager to talk that she isn’t paying attention, even to her own party’s narratives and talking points. Proof that she is ethically ignorant. Proof that she cannot be trusted. Proof that she is a charming demagogue whose passionate assertions can’t be believed or trusted. Writes the Washington Post’s  Aaron Blake, whose orientation is “Please, please don’t make mistakes like this, because we need you to be successful!”,

“She’s practically saying, ‘Well, maybe I was wrong, but at least my cause is just.’”

She isn’t practically saying that; she is saying that. She’s also saying that the ends justify the means, and if the ends are sufficiently righteous, what’s a little bit of fudging on the facts? This is classic “truthiness,” the term invented by Stephen Colbert to mock conservatives and the Bush Administration in 2005 (he has, oddly, never used the word to tweak Democrats, and won’t use it against Ocasio-Cortez, I guarantee…because, as he has now proven, Colbert has no integrity, and is only interested in advancing an ideology, not in even-handed satire). Continue reading →