State of Tuesday: THE TRUTH BEHIND SCOTT PELLEY'S EPIC CBS MELTDOWN
He is almost certainly shrieking on the inside
Greetings, Dear Reader,
Let’s get after it.
THE TRUTH BEHIND SCOTT PELLEY’S EPIC CBS MELTDOWN
I like to picture him shrieking, but Scott Pelley almost certainly delivered the line with confidence.
“She’s murdering ’60 Minutes,’” Pelley said of his insurgent new boss, Bari Weiss. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that. She has no qualifications for her job.”
The assertion came in what turned out to be a very-not-public grilling Pelley gave his other new boss, Nick Bilton, the executive producer Weiss hired to run 60 Minutes.
“You have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic. So why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
This is a recurring theme with Pelley, qualifications. What is qualified, what isn’t. Importantly, who is and who isn’t.
In case you were wondering whether this whole outburst was scripted with intent of leaking: The Post had both a recording of the entire exchange along with two sources in the room willing to corroborate.
The story was bowtied and dropped into WaPo’s lap.
It ended with Bilton leaving the room and the entire staff giving Pelley a standing ovation. In other words, the “and then everyone clapped” meme except in real life.
—
Just two months after Donald Trump declared a state of emergency in mid-March 2020, Pelley sat across from Peter Daszak for a segment on 60 Minutes.
In case you don’t know, Dear Reader, in broadcast news media, 60 Minutes is the pinnacle. It’s The New York Times and WSJ rolled into one. How they cover stories and, more importantly, what they choose to cover, sets the tone for all other broadcasters.
That’s why it airs on Sunday night. The almost pompous assumption is that whatever it is they cover will kick start the national conversation the following Monday morning.
For a long time, decades in fact, both were true. 60 set the tone for the week’s broadcast cycle by deciding the parameters of importance – what is and is not an important issue. More subtly, 60 also decided the how. This is not just important, but also look at how we covered it.
For a time it was good, but then Pelley sat with Dascak. Ironically, it was exactly a year since Pelley had published his memoir. It was titled, “Truth Worth Telling.”
The irony, Dear Reader, is that it implies an inverse. Some truths are not worth telling. Who would decide those?
What was known when Pelley did the interview with Daszak, given maybe just an hour’s worth of reading publicly available documents on government websites, is that Daszak’s organization, EcoHealth Alliance, had received millions of dollars to do “research” that often resembled once-banned “gain of function” experiments. These experiments, according to the NIH’s own website, were “dual use,” meaning they had WMD potential.
(If you read the papers leading up to the ban, researchers didn’t just think they could develop WMDs, but could quite feasibly end human civilization outright.)
Public contracts showed EcoHealth had given taxpayer money to Wuhan Institute of Virology for this exact kind of research. Public documents showed WIV’s intent to create this exact kind of virus for the purposes of developing “therapeutics” – ie, vaccines – that never, to any public reporting, materialized.
It was also publicly available information that Daszak had co-bylined an op-ed in The Lancet journal declaring WIV’s innocence and branding lab leak hypothesis a grave thought crime.
Given this reeking stew of conflicts – a man who derived his wealth from this research declaring there’s no way it was dangerous or spawned covid – certainly a reporter of Pelley’s pedigree would strip bark off the man sitting in front of him?
No.
Instead, Pelley asked Daszak flatly if the virus could have come from a lab, a question Daszak had already publicly answered in Lancet – without disclosing his financial conflict. Of course, Daszak repeated the line. Pelley let it go, deferring to Daszak’s status as a “scientist.”
Daszak would ultimately not escape accountability. The man is unemployed and financially destitute now. EcoHealth is barred from applying for government grants. The “conspiracy theory” Daszak, with Pelley’s deference, sought to smack down is now essentially assumed true.
The real controversy however isn’t that 60 Minutes got it wrong per se, it’s that 60 Minutes deciding the parameters of legitimate inquiry delayed vigorous inspection of all the facts. It gave China and the institutions and individuals at the center of the damage enough time to cover their tracks.
Essentially, under Pelley and its then-leadership, 60 Minutes functioned to delay accountability for powerful figures at the center of massive public malfeasance.
—
It wasn’t the only crucial misstep worth revisiting.
Months later, 60’s Lesley Stahl would look Trump in the eye and tell him flatly that Hunter Biden’s laptop “could not” be verified. Stahl’s salary was more than Daily Caller’s entire payroll, and yet we managed to verify the emails in question with Google’s servers just days later.
At the same time, 60 Minutes was airing news packages on school closures due to COVID-19. These packages deferred, like Pelley, to the expertise and qualifications of officials at the center of the decisionmaking. Like Daszak, many of these officials had clear conflicts of interest.
By then, thanks to truly comprehensive state and federal covid tracking sites, we’d already known the case fatality rate of people younger than 18 was somewhere between .01 and .03%. In other words, less fatal than the flu.
Students have yet to fully recover from the learning loss.
—
To call 60’s 2020 an abject failure would be understatement. 60 helped set the what and the how on the three most important stories of the year, and did so in a way that had meaningful, measurable detriment to normal Americans.
But hey, their friends in politics and elite journalism benefitted.
—
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.
MORE LINKS
Jill Biden Admits Doctors Checked On Joe After Disastrous Debate
Speaking of a very biased media with an agenda.
Female Democrats Assemble To Whine About How Much Their Periods Hurt
…
ROOKE: The Austin Metcalf Trial Won’t Be Televised. That’s Because The Defense Is Too Ugly To Watch
Rooke with the hard-hitting analysis, yet again.
Like what you’re reading? If so, please consider subscribing to State of the Day or sharing this with a friend. You’d be supporting this newsletter and helping keep independent journalism alive.
If you are already a paid subscriber, make sure to join the conversation in our subscribers-only chat below.
Scott Pelley is from Lubbock Texas. Pelley does not begin to represent the values of the city he was raised in. He's a disgrace!!