The Bell Is Tolling for Puffed-Up, Arrogant Propagandists at CBS

It isn’t particularly healthy or wise to pay too much attention to CBS News’ flagship 60 Minutes program anymore. Most people recognize that what happens on that program isn’t really objective journalism but rather several segments of elite corporate propaganda strung together and packaged as “news,” and were it not for a sports lead-in on Sunday afternoons/evenings, 60 Minutes’ audience wouldn’t merit much discussion at all.

But 60 Minutes made news off-air a week or so ago when Bill Owens, who had been the show’s executive producer for more than two decades, picked up his ball and went home. Owens resigned in a huff over what he alleged was corporate meddling by CBS’s parent company, Paramount, which is trying to posture itself for a merger with Skydance Media in a deal that is nearly a year in the making.

“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,” Owens wrote in a final memo that was obtained by the New York Post.

“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,” he added.

Per the outlet, Owens wrote that “‘60 Minutes’ will continue to cover the new administration, as we will report on future administrations.”

“The show is too important to the country. It has to continue, just not with me as the executive producer,” he wrote.

CBS News President Wendy McMahon also shared praise for Owens, writing in a separate memo, “Standing behind what he stood for was an easy decision for me, and I never took for granted that he did the same for me.”

Except the sainted Bill Owens steered CBS News and 60 Minutes into a $10 billion lawsuit with President Trump thanks to a special bit of propaganda in which the program selectively edited an interview with Kamala Harris to hide the fact that she’s utterly incapable of giving cogent answers to basic questions. That the interview happened in the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign, and the editing was so obvious that it was immediately picked apart by half the influencers on the internet, made that lawsuit inevitable. (RELATED: FCC Pulls a ‘60 Minutes’ on ‘60 Minutes’)

Remember Kamala’s word salad answer about Israel on 60 Minutes? It’s gone.

This is what many Americans will now see. pic.twitter.com/H4w7btDv6x

— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 8, 2024

Putting your employer on the hook for a larger legal liability than the value of the merger deal that employer is trying to make isn’t what you’d judge to be a great resume point.

It isn’t like anything Bill Owens or anyone else at CBS News will say about “accuracy” or “objectivity” can survive that Kamala Harris interview. And coming on the heels of another presidential-campaign interview, the one Lesley Stahl did with Trump in October 2020 that was also selectively edited — and when Trump released the full interview in advance of 60 Minutes’ cut of it, that was made clear — we’re now looking at two elections in a row in which CBS News set its own credibility aflame.

Nobody really cared that much about Owens’s resignation. Perhaps because of this fact, the on-air talent at 60 Minutes decided to draw more attention to it. Which resulted in this maudlin spectacle at the end of Sunday’s broadcast…

Wow.

Scott Pelley’s puffed-up bloviations about journalistic integrity reminded me of this rather famous skewering he earned at Megyn Kelly’s hands last year after the election…

It should be mentioned that Owens was one of the CBS suits responsible for sparking new FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s interest in investigating the network under the long-standing-but-little-used “news distortion” doctrine — something which has generated a firestorm of criticism by other left-wing media outlets and even some level of rebuke by center-right organizations (among them Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist), but nevertheless makes the Skydance merger even more problematic.

The thing about this is that outside of CBS’s newsroom, very, very few people give a fig about Bill Owens or what Scott Pelley has to say about him.

And that’s what makes this episode so noteworthy. For anyone older than, say, 45, or who paid attention to the news business before Bill Owens took over 60 Minutes 24 years ago, the idea that the show would be as irrelevant and oft-ridiculed as it currently is would certainly be a surprise.

But this is where we are, and it’s remarkable that no one is willing to place accountability on the people who brought us here.

Here is somebody under whose watch the most dominant news program in American history has turned into a risk-management nightmare, and who almost certainly resigned “under pressure” because he was a problem for Paramount’s corporate suits as they attempt to sell themselves off to the Ellison empire.

Skydance is something of a vanity media company; its 42-year-old founder and CEO, David Ellison, is the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. And there is a lot of interesting speculation going around about this, because Larry Ellison was a Republican megadonor until last year, when he mostly went dark — and David Ellison, more or less out of the blue, gave $900,000 to Joe Biden’s re-election campaign last spring.

But this happened at a time when Skydance was just getting involved in attempting to buy out Paramount.

And there are people who will tell you the Ellisons were doing everything they could to sneak that merger past the Biden FCC and SEC, which would account for the younger Ellison’s substantial greasing of Biden’s re-election campaign.

Is it possible that everyone involved knows Paramount, and by extension CBS, is about to find itself flipped from blue to red?

Or is that too much to ask for?

Or does it even matter given the degradation of CBS News into the leftist soup the Scott Pelleys, Margaret Brennans, and Bill Owens have made of it? Would anyone even care if it tried to recover its credibility and balance?

These questions probably can’t be answered yet. What’s safe to say, though, is that the days of the Pelleys and Owenses of the world preening about objective journalism while spewing Soviet-style fake narratives and attempting (and progressively failing) to rig public perception of events are rapidly coming to an end.

Whether the Ellisons put a stop to it or the market generally does, we won’t be listening to primetime broadcasts of pompous eulogies for failed network TV producers at CBS much longer.

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