HELTER STELTER:

"I hope 60 Minutes remains 60 Minutes. There are very few things that have been around for as long as 60 Minutes has and maintained the quality that it has…" https://t.co/8C6oQFmwYT

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) May 18, 2026

Flashback to 2017: Stelter Skips Dan Rather Fiasco in 22-Minute Interview on the History of ’60 Minutes.’

CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter routinely trashes President Trump for sticking to “his safe space” and doing interviews on Fox News. But on his show on Sunday, he provided the safest of spaces to 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager. Both on CNN and in his 22-minute podcast, Stelter discussed the history of the CBS magazoine show without once mentioning Dan Rather or his phony-documents fiasco attacking President George W. Bush on 60 Minutes II in 2004.

That’s because for Stelter, Dan Rather became one of CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources.’

Stelter often invokes the importance of truth and facts in his run-up to bringing on Rather, whose reputation was shattered for ignoring those things in the defining episode of his career.

Rather reported on documents in 2004 purporting to show George W. Bush had been derelict in his duties and gone absent without leave from the Texas Air National Guard in the 1970s. The documents were almost immediately revealed to be forgeries. CBS and Rather initially stood by the report, but Rather was eventually forced to apologize, and the 60 Minutes producers of the segment were fired. Rather was forced out of the anchor chair in 2005.

However, Rather has long insisted his team was correct and reported the truth about Bush avoiding Vietnam service and shirking his responsibilities with the National Guard. He’s even gotten assistance from Hollywood in what came to be known as “Rathergate.”

A 2015 movie based on producer Mary Mapes’s memoir of the affair, called Truth, starred Robert Redford as Rather, portraying him and Mapes as flawed but heroic in their journalistic pursuits. It was a box office flop and tepidly received by critics, some of whom panned it as didactic, simplistic, and one-sided. The Atlantic called it a “terrible, terrible movie about journalism.”

60 Minutes’ quality control has been uniformly terrible, but as long as it leans hard in Stelter’s direction, all is well in his world.