New CBS Anchor Scott Pelley Threatens to Bring 60 Minutes-Style Fairness to Evening News
CBS News has lately been running ads touting their new Evening News anchor Scott Pelley as bringing “the world class original reporting of 60 Minutes, now every weeknight.” If so, those who hoped CBS would finally shift towards a more fair-and-balanced approach to the news may again be disappointed. Last year, MRC news analysts reviewed “the world class reporting” on 60 Minutes and found a lopsided agenda that strongly favored liberals. In the previous five years, 60 Minutes aired 35 interviews with liberal leaders and celebrities, most of which (69%) were friendly and unchallenging. In contrast, only five of the 17 conservative segments (29 percent) were soft, a huge tilt both in the amount and the tone of CBS’s coverage. In a “ Profile in Bias ” report MRC put together earlier this spring, Pelley’s 60 Minutes segments were well-represented for his generous coverage of liberals, including Hillary Clinton (“star power”) and retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Pelley also used his podium to make a case for universal health insurance and decried the horrible economy as seemingly taken from “the pages of the Great Depression” (that was during the Bush years, when unemployment was 5%, not during the Obama years). And, when one of his 60 Minutes pieces on global warming came under fire as being too one-sided, he disdained those who disagreed as akin to “Holocaust deniers,” grumbling to a reporter for CBSNews.com: “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?” Here are a few of Pelley’s most notorious moments at CBS thus far (for the full package, visit www.MRC.org):
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on June 6, 2011. Filed under