JOHN NOLTE: Lesley Stahl, Van Jones ‘Extremely Worried’ About Death of Corporate Media Influence.
“I’m extremely worried about the press. I despair. I worry greatly. We’re at the point where if [sic] the POTUS is going to say ‘Legacy media is dead.’ I’m very dark about it.”
Eat it, sweetheart.
If the knowledge that Lesley Stahl is despairing and in a dark place does not make you want to stand up and cheer, you must be a feminist.
You see, throughout the 2024 campaign, the corporate media were Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. They didn’t know they were dead. Being ignorant of their own death, they played all their usual games assuming it would drag Kamala Harris — Celebrity Obama 2.0 — over the finish line. Stahl’s own 60 Minutes went so far as to dishonestly edit Kamala’s interview to make her sound smart. Van Jones’ own CNN raged on and on about Trump’s “Nazi rally” at Madison Square Garden and spread the hoax about Trump calling for Liz Cheney’s execution. Then…
The “too big to rig” results came in on Election Night and it finally hit them: We’re dead. No one believes us anymore. Our influence is gone. We can’t rig elections anymore with our lies and hoaxes. Despair! Despair! Despair!
Donald Trump visiting podcast after podcast, doing Joe Rogan, sitting down for a handful of Breitbart News interviews, is as big a sea change in politics as when John F. Kennedy embraced television in 1960. Radio was declared dead. TV was king.
Well, now, the legacy media is dead and alternative media is king.
But there is one important difference between 1960 and 2025, and that’s this: The 1960 switch was based on technology, the difference in what radio and TV offered. The 2025 switch is based on the legacy media’s credibility implosion, in other words…
Click over for a massive (and very likely incomplete) list of hoaxes “reported” by the DNC-MSM over the past decade. As Tim Graham writes at NewsBusters: Journalists Deserve All the Angst That Trump’s Win Brings.
Longtime CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl engaged in conversation at the 92nd Street Y in New York City with columnist Peggy Noonan, and they both agreed the legacy media are “fraying” – for 20 years, Noonan insisted.
“I’m extremely worried about the press,” Stahl said, as she dragged out her usual story about Trump and press criticism. “I once asked Donald Trump why do you keep pounding on the press? This was right after he won, in 2016….It’s kinda boring, you say the same thing over and over, and you won! It’s time to drop it!”
This is a bizarre demand, since no one in the press announced, “well, Trump won, so it’s kind of boring to keep criticizing him, saying the same thing over and over.”
Stahl said she asked why he would do it, and Trump replied: “I do it, and I repeat it, because the more I do that, the less people are going to believe you when you say negative things about me….And it’s happened!” The media’s public trust ratings are the worst they’ve ever been in the television era.
This alleged Trump comment did not air on CBS, although Stahl drags out the anecdote like it’s nefarious. It’s the exact opposite of the Stahl shtick — if I attack Trump, and I repeat it, it means the more I do it, the less people are going to believe Trump when he attacks the press. But he’s won that battle.
“I despair, seriously. I worry greatly,” Stahl said. “We’re at a point where if the President of the United States is going to say ‘Legacy media is dead’…It is, kind of, sort of hobbling right now. And I don’t know how it recovers. I’m very dark about it.”
Noonan made the mistake of associating an unpopular press with the end of freedom of the press, which is not the same thing. The First Amendment doesn’t automatically grant sainthood to the press. You’re allowed to think the press has performed terribly without ending the First Amendment. That’s freedom of speech.
Noonan didn’t push back on Stahl. She could ask if CBS and 60 Minutes ever did anything wrong that undermined trust in the media. Dan Rather offered the nation phony documents about George W. Bush on 60 Minutes II.
Lesley Stahl is infamous among Republicans for lecturing Trump in 2020 that you could not report on the Hunter Biden laptop because it could not be verified. CBS reporter Catherine Herridge verified the laptop in 2022, and she’s no longer at CBS.
RedState’s Nick Arama adds: Megyn Kelly Completely Wrecks Lesley Stahl After Her Whining About Legacy Media Dying.
Megyn Kelly explains to Leslie Stahl (of CBS 60 Minutes) how they can recover their credibility.
— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) December 13, 2024
“Should we go over them?” she continued. Then she proceeded to completely wreck Stahl.
“Like maybe don’t say the laptop can’t be verified when it can,” she said, referring to Stahl’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop. How are you a journalist if you don’t want to follow up on that story?
“And then when your own organization verifies it, come out and do a mea culpa and admit you embarrassed yourself.”
Maybe don’t stealth edit the presidential candidate interview with ’60 Minutes’ — your flagship program that you’re an anchor of — without telling us, and then when it becomes a controversy, refuse to release the transcript because you’re more interested in running cover for the Dems than you are in honest reporting.
“60 Minutes” edited the interview that they did with Kamala Harris, reducing her word salad response. And frankly we don’t know what else they may have edited since they refused to release a transcript or the full video of the interview. Which tends to make you think they might be hiding even more nonsense.
Maybe don’t host a vice-presidential debate where you fact-check only one side. And then when your fact-check gets fact-checked by the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican side, you cut his mic.
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head what you can do about it.
Now, that’s a complete evisceration if ever there was one. That’s reality, and Stahl should listen.
But she won’t because that might actually require putting aside their bias and doing a little self-examination.
Since they’re absolutely incapable of self-examination, they’d be far better off in admitting their biases — the idea of an “objective” media is a fossil left over from the earliest days of three radio and later TV networks. Now there is an unending firehose of media to choose from. No wonder voters chose the media that they thought best reflected their interests — and equally important, didn’t condescend to them.