LESLEY STAHL SAYS JOURNALISTS GETTING FIRED IS WORSE THAN CHILD TRAFFICKING, NAZI TORTURE DUNGEONS:
Stahl is 84—even older than Joe Biden. She lived through 9/11 and the Jimmy Carter administration. She witnessed the self-inflicted debasement of her former colleague Dan Rather after he reported on forged documents purporting to cast doubt on President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. That was pretty bad.
What else might the iconic journalist have experienced in her career that was almost, but not quite, as traumatizing as corporate restructuring in a dying industry?
Well, Stahl’s first story as a 60 Minutes correspondent was about child trafficking in Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She visited a family that wanted to sell their four-year-old son for $500 to buy a camcorder. The following year, Stahl interviewed survivors of Josef Mengele’s twisted human experiments at Auschwitz. In 2020, she was forced to endure interviews with Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, cofounders of the much-maligned Lincoln Project super PAC.
It’s entirely plausible that Stahl was more disturbed upon learning that a handful of journalists had been fired by CBS. After all, she is a journalist, and many journalists have described Pelley’s termination alone as one the greatest tragedies to befall mankind.
Stahl has unintentionally (well, I think unintentionally) channeled Mel Brooks’ classic 2000 Year Old Man character, who told Carl Reiner in 1963, “To me, tragedy is if I’ll cut my finger. That’s tragedy. It bleeds, and I’ll cry, and I’ll run around, and I’ll go into Mount Sinai for a day and a half. I’m very nervous about it. And to me, comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die. What do I care? That’s comedy. My finger is important.”
Scott Pelley concurs:
Having lost a job and lost a spouse in my lifetime, they are very, very, so much not the same. https://t.co/tTEyYTIYwM
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) June 10, 2026