The CBS News magazine TV show, 60 Minutes, has gotten boring because it’s so predictable in criticizing the Trump administration week after week after having given a pass to Biden for the last four years.
The latest was the claim that Health Department funding is being decimated as the Trump administration is slowing things down to look and see where this money is actually going.
And to prove its point, who does 60 Minutes use as its go-to guy? None other than Dr. Francis Collins, the lying stooge who headed up our National Institutes of Health, and was caught lying about the origins of Covid.
60 Minutes made out their director, Bill Owens, to be a martyr for resigning after the program’s parent company, Paramount, expressed disapproval with Owens’ splicing an interview of Kamala Harris to enhance her electoral prospects.
There was nothing noble about Owens resigning in protest. There was nothing for him to complain about. Paramount had every right to be concerned that 60 Minutes was engaging in election interference by deliberately doctoring Kamala Harris’ garbled response to a basic question about the Middle East. Her actual answer was one of her typical word salads that sounded utterly ridiculous and incomprehensible. 60 Minutes took her answer to a different question several minutes later and substituted it for her actual dunderhead response that would have left viewers with the impression that she was not up to the job.
The program tried to defend it by claiming it was an edit for time reasons. That’s perfectly common and acceptable if you’re chopping up her original answer to the original question for the sake of brevity. But that’s not what happened here. They actually substituted an entirely different response to a different question later in the interview to make it sound like that was her response to the question posed.
And it’s quite obvious why it was done. 60 Minutes under Owens’ tenure has made it clear that they are rooting against Trump and in favor of whomever his opponent might be. They went from a vaunted and prestigious — tough but fair — program to a politically motivated leftist propaganda machine run by never-Trumpers.
There is plenty of material upon which to legitimately criticize Trump. But every single 60 Minutes edition has at least one segment trashing the Trump administration. (Let’s not forget Leslie Stahl’s sanctimonious objection to Trump’s accurate claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic.) There’s never a positive article that comes out for Trump, or Republicans for that matter.
A perfect example of their leftist slant was when they interviewed elitist European leaders who were censoring right-of-center political perspectives they disagreed with. 60 Minutes got quotes and interviews from several sources, every one of which supported this form of censorship. Not one contrary opinion was presented opposing this censorship, which is totally against liberal values that these European nations were supposed to stand for.
Moreover, they did not make any mention of how that same type of censorship was running amok in the Biden administration.
But perhaps the worst lefty, biased segment the program presented in the last few years was their segment about concerned parents in South Carolina. objecting to pornography being made accessible to their children at various schools.
(One lawsuit that is presently in front of the courts was brought by Muslim parents who were denied the ability to opt out of gender and LGBT classes for religious purposes.)
Moderator Scott Pelly dedicated an entire segment castigating the South Carolina parents who objected to inappropriate, sexually explicit material being given to their children as some reactionary far-right Neanderthals. The 60 Minutes segment never alluded to the horrible content. They described the parents as being book banners and censors.
It’s time for 60 Minutes to go back to the days of Mike Wallace and Morley Safer.
So good riddance to Bill Owens. Take your leftist, political operative bias out the door with you and return 60 Minutes to its once vaunted pedestal.