QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: In 2017, CBS’s Scott Pelley had this exchange with blogger/tweeter Mike Cernovich during a 60 Minutes interview that ultimately went quite badly — for Pelley:

Scott Pelley: How would you describe what you do?

Mike Cernovich: I’m a lawyer, author, documenter, filmmaker, and journalist.

Scott Pelley: And how would you describe your website?

Mike Cernovich: Edgy, controversial content that goes against the dominant narrative.

Scott Pelley: What’s the dominant narrative?

Mike Cernovich: The dominant narrative is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are liberals. Everybody on the right is a bad guy. Let’s find a way to make everybody look bad. Let’s tie marginal figures who have no actual influence to anybody we cannot overwrite. That’s the narrative.

Scott Pelley: That’s not a narrative I’m familiar with. Who’s narrative is that?

CBS’s, of course:

Exit question: Does CBS News “have a right to bear arms access reporter? How about a freedom of religion reporter? Activism from a major news network is fine but it is weird when they claim to be unbiased.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: CBS’s Scott Pelley Blasts Former Boss David Rhodes for ‘Hostile Work Environment.’

Flashback: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in his Favor.

STEVE SCALISE REALLY NEEDS TO STOP WEARING THOSE SHORT SKIRTS. Scott Pelley of CBS: It’s time to ask whether [Wednesday’s] attack was foreseeable, predictable, self-inflicted:

In February, the president tweeted that the news media were the “enemy of the American people”… Later, at a lunch for reporters, President Trump was asked whether he worried that language would incite violence. His pause indicated it had never crossed his mind. Then he said, “No, that doesn’t worry me.”

As children we’re taught, “Words will never hurt me.” But when you think about it, violence almost always begins with words. In “Twitter world,” we’ve come to believe that our first thought is our best thought.

It’s past time for all of us — presidents, politicians, reporters, citizens, all of us — to pause to think again.

Pelley is serving up warmed-over January 2011-era DNC-MSM new civility leftovers. But does he have any second thoughts about comparing those who don’t toe the leftist line on global warming to Holocaust deniers?

DISPATCHES FROM OLD MEDIA:

Shot: BREAKING: Reports Say Pelley Has Lost ‘CBS Evening News’ Job.

— Curtis Houck, NewsBusters, last night.

Chaser: America Learns Of Someone Named Scott Pelley.

—Jim Treacher, the Daily Caller, today.

According to Page Six, “Insiders tell us that CBS News president David Rhodes ‘is making [Pelley] move to ‘60 Minutes,’ and that the pair ‘don’t get on.’” Houck notes that the basic details of Pelley being exiled fulltime to 60 Minutes has been confirmed by multiple sources.

I’m not sure why the brother of Obama’s infamous former Middle East “advisor” and failed novelist Ben Rhodes is upset with Pelley — he’s been totally objective and unbiased in his role as newsreader to the elderly. Totally.

ANCHOR AWAY? CBS ‘Star’ Scott Pelley’s Ratings Tank as He Goes After Trump. Is He a Goner? But he got so many plaudits from his fellow media folks.

CBS’S SCOTT PELLEY LOSES A FIGHT RIGGED IN HIS FAVOR: Ever since it was created by Don Hewitt in 1968, CBS’s Sixty Minutes has functioned as a sort of ritual kabuki for its audiences: it made stars of its left-leaning investigative journalists, who would grill the offending conservative politician or businessman of the week. By the mid-’80s, the show’s formula was summed up brilliantly in the classic parodies by Martin Short’s Nathan Thurm character on Saturday Night Live, who would be drenched in sweat and chain-smoking Marlboro 100s by the time he was done attempting to survive the hammering from the crusading journalist on the other side of the desk.

But CBS made its bones during the days when, as Rob Long wrote of NBC’s Johnny Carson, “There were three big channels—and maybe an old movie on one of those fuzzy UHF stations—so if you didn’t like what was on, you were out of luck. Network television didn’t compete with cable channels or Hulu or Amazon Prime. It competed with silence.”

And such lack of competition allowed the networks’ news divisions to create self-contained worlds where they could absolutely control the dialogue, as Walter Cronkite did throughout his career at CBS, while signing off each night “And that’s the way it is.” His successor’s career at CBS ended there with a Sixty Minutes segment…well, we all know how it ended there, right?

Which brings us to CBS’s Scott Pelley and his recent interview with Mike Cernovich, whom Breitbart.com’s Ezra Dulis describes as “a lawyer, independent blogger/author/filmmaker, and a dominant voice on Twitter,” and whom BuzzFeed describes as “a troll.” The latter Website of course is home of the infamous Trump golden showers with Russian hookers story and an editor who believes covering Trump “sometimes…means publishing unverified information in a transparent way that informs our users of its provenance, its impact and why we trust or distrust it.”

Whatever Cernovich’s excesses, assuming this transcript of the full unedited interview is accurate, it’s fascinating much more for what it reveals about Pelley, watched by six and a half million viewers on the CBS Evening News, than for Cernovich. Here’s how the transcript begins:

Scott Pelley: How would you describe what you do?

Mike Cernovich: I’m a lawyer, author, documenter, filmmaker, and journalist.

Scott Pelley: And how would you describe your website?

Mike Cernovich: Edgy, controversial content that goes against the dominant narrative.

Scott Pelley: What’s the dominant narrative?

Mike Cernovich: The dominant narrative is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are liberals. Everybody on the right is a bad guy. Let’s find a way to make everybody look bad. Let’s tie marginal figures who have no actual influence to anybody we cannot overwrite. That’s the narrative.

Scott Pelley: That’s not a narrative I’m familiar with. Who’s narrative is that?

In 2008, Pelley compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Ben Rhodes, who until January was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, is the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation and the “political director” for CBS, wrote an article for Slate in 2013 charmingly titled “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” Katie Couric, whom Pelley succeeded as Evening News host, read a poem on her broadcast to shill for the passing of Obamacare, and after leaving CBS had a Rathergate-like moment of her own, attempting to marginalize gun owners.

But back to the transcript of Pelley and Cernovich, where eventually, the hunter is captured by his prey:  

Scott Pelley: You wrote in August a story about Hillary Clinton’s medical condition the headlines said, “Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s disease. Position confirms.” That’s quite a headline.

Mike Cernovich: Yeah, Dr. Ted Noel had se-sent a story to me anonymously, that I checked out, analyzing her medical condition. And –

Scott Pelley: It isn’t true.

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, she doesn’t seem to have any signs of Parkinson’s disease.

Mike Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day caught by a citizen journalist.

Scott Pelley: Did you, well, she had pneumonia. I mean –

Mike Cernovich: How do you know?

Scott Pelley: Well, because that’s what was reported.

Mike Cernovich: By whom? Who told you that?

Scott Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.

Mike Cernovich: Why would you trust a campaign?

To ask the question is to answer it. In a post headlined “‘Shamefully Stupid’: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in His Favor,” Breitbart.com’s Ezra Dulis adds in response, “Pelley has no answer for those six words — ‘Why would you trust the campaign’ — as his entire profession goes berserk with literal-minded fact checks for every tweet from President Trump. Pelley also seems to forget the fakery that Clinton World attempted hours before its pneumonia statement — with the candidate smiling and waving outside her daughter’s apartment, greeting a little girl, and assuring reporters everything was a-okay.”

More:

Mike Cernovich: So let’s be, let’s be honest with one another, which is that you are reporting that the Hillary Clinton campaign-

Scott Pelley: I didn’t report that she had Parkinson’s disease.

Mike Cernovich: You just told me she’s healthy though. Based on what was told to you by the campaign. See? That’s what I’m saying about the double standards which is I don’t take anything Hillary Clinton’s going to say at all as true. I’m not going to take her on her word. The media says we’re not going to take Donald Trump on his word. And that’ why we are on these different universes.

Scott Pelley: Why should anyone take you on your word?

Mike Cernovich: Oh, you should always double-check. You should always fact check. And if people don’t agree with me, people express that disagreement, and I’m completely, completely open to criticism.

Insert Glenn Reynolds’ Rathergate-era comments about the positive nature of the Internet being a low-trust environment here. Not to mention Michael Crichton’s Gell-Man Amnesia Effect.

Let’s give Pelley the exit quote: “Well, the benefit of intermediaries is having experienced editors check things out and research people. Check the facts before it goes out to the public. You don’t do any of that.”

Mary Mapes could not be reached for comment.

UPDATE: “Was Pelley not around in 2004?” John Hinderaker asks at Power Line. “Has he forgotten how stupid that refrain sounded then? (‘Layers and layers of fact-checkers’) Does he not realize how false it rings today? We have been here before: the liberal media are in a panic because their authority is being challenged. It must be worse now, though, than it was in 2004. Then, Time’s refrain was a relatively benign ‘Who owns the truth?’ Now, they ask, ‘Is truth dead?’ We can translate: ‘Is the liberal news media monopoly dead?’”

JOURNALISM: Scott Pelley’s POS (Particularly Odious Speech).

UNEXPECTEDLY: No Rally-around-the-Flag Effect for ‘Vibrant’ Biden So Far.

The Hamas attack on Israel was not a direct attack on the United States, but the attack killed at least 30 Americans, and to many of us, it was so heinous and bloodthirsty that it felt like an attack on America, or perhaps against humanity itself. In past crises, public-opinion polling has shown a “rally around the flag” effect — a surge in support for the head of state and reduced criticism for the leader of a country.

So far, that hasn’t happened for President Biden. Americans’ opinions of Biden appear pretty much the same as two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, as Dominic notes, Sky News asked Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen whether Joe Biden has the energy for another five years in office. She answered that Biden is “very involved, very vibrant.” When Americans think of Biden, I don’t think “vibrant” is the word that comes to mind.

When even Democratic Party operative with a lavaliere Scott Pelley describes the (p)resident as “tired,” you know the pilot light is completely out.

THAT TIME IN 1968 WHEN JIMMY PAGE AND THE YARDBIRDS PLAYED AT A CINCINNATI HIGH SCHOOL PROM: “Some say the plan was hatched by a fearless junior named Rip Pelley, with an almost inexplicable connection to music industry insiders. Some say the rock band idea was a proverbial olive branch offered by Father Smith, who’d requested the combination prom in an effort to save money, or because he’d done it that way at his previous school. Either way, what came next is the stuff of legend: The Yardbirds ended up playing the 1968 St. Xavier High School Junior-Senior prom. Lead guitarist? Rolling Stone magazine’s third-greatest guitarist of all time, Jimmy Page.”

60 MINUTES MAKES FAKE NEWS ABOUT HUMANS RUINING EARTH:

Chalk this up as 60 Minutes hosting the worst peddler of false knowledge since Dan Rather left the set.

CBS kicked off 2023 by touting “mass extinction” blather by Paul Ehrlich, the guy who’s been peddling radical and misanthropic eco-garbage since his book The Population Bomb in 1968.

That screed began: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines–hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

This may qualify as the drop-dead dumbest announcement of the Sixties and should have disqualified him from the status of Expert by the end of the 1970s. But the left-wing media never tire of him. They can’t get enough of this ecological self-loathing. The human race is always a pestilence on the planet.

Pelley led off the show with Ehrlich warning that “I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Something that Ehrlich has been shouting for over 50 years: 60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich’s Failed Doomsaying One More Time. The Population Bomber has never been right, but is never in doubt that the world is coming to its end.

And curiously, someone who has long wished to implement socialism nationally sees National Socialists under every bed:

America’s Newspaper of Record suggests an alternate guest for the show: 60 Minutes Interviews Population Control Expert Thanos.

60 MINUTES PROMOTES PAUL EHRLICH’S FAILED DOOMSAYING ONE MORE TIME:

Stanford University biologist and perennially wrong doomster Paul Ehrlich appeared on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday where he once again declared, “I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we’ve had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Ehrlich made himself (in)famous when he in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb: predicted that “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Instead of rising as Ehrlich predicted, the global crude death per 1,000 people has fallen from 12.5 in 1968 to 7 in 2019 before ticking up to 8 in the pandemic year of 2020.

At least CBS correspondent Scott Pelley acknowledged, “The alarm Ehrlich sounded in ’68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine. He was wrong about that. The green revolution fed the world.” Nevertheless, Pelley credulously reports Ehrlich’s assertion that the world is undergoing a Sixth Mass Extinction owing to humanity’s rising population and consumption. Paleontologists have identified five previous mass extinction events during the past 450 million years in which something like three-quarters of species disappeared due to events like supervolcano eruptions and asteroid strikes.

How wrong was Ehrlich back then? This wrong: (Video) Paul Ehrlich in 1970: “The FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television.”

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM 60 MINUTES! Paul Ehrlich Is Always Wrong. “0% of the time, he’s right every time,” Jim Treacher writes:

When a 90-year-old man says there are too many people on the planet, you’re allowed to ask why he’s still sticking around.

* * * * * * * *

I’d ask why CBS News is still giving this crank a platform after he’s been wrong about literally everything for over half a century. I’d wonder why sonorous dimwit Scott Pelley is still spreading Ehrlich’s nonsense. But it’s not as if the field of journalism is capable of disappointing me anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to hate humanity. Some of my best friends are misanthropists. But creeps like Ehrlich try to cloak their malevolence in altruism, and it’s just phony. The climate cultists don’t care about mankind. They see us as vermin and want us out of the way so they can bring about a utopia they can rule. They’re fascists.

Should Pelley offer a second opinion to counterbalance Ehrlich’s eco-doomsaying? Let’s ask him! In January 2007, Pelley “was asked why he refused to include global warming skeptics in his reporting. He responded, ‘If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’”

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Do Biden’s words even matter anymore?

On the subject of Taiwan and China, Biden once again stated that Taiwan would be defended militarily should mainland China stage an invasion to reclaim the island. Before the show was even over, the White House had put out a statement saying that America’s One China policy remains unchanged.

Yet most telling was when Pelley accompanied Biden to the Detroit Auto Show, and he took note that the convention was going on without masks or social distancing or vaccine mandates. Pelley asked Biden very directly, “Is the pandemic over?” “The pandemic is over,” Biden responded. “We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over.” This wasn’t a gaffe. This wasn’t a slip-up. He reiterated it again in his response.

This left the White House in yet another bind on issues from student loan forgiveness to immigration restrictions to vaccine mandates, all of which to one degree or another are premised on the idea that we’re in a pandemic. Biden’s words could jeopardize legal cases his administration might be preparing. His usual media defenders, like the Washington Post and NPR, sprang into action to spin Biden’s own words. Politico and CNN were given statements that in fact the pandemic is not over.

Biden’s own staffers are undermining the nominal president’s statement: White House cleans up Biden’s ‘very consistent’ claim pandemic is ‘over.’ “Biden’s press secretary said Wednesday that the president was speaking about public sentiment, not the state of emergency, during a headline-grabbing 60 Minutes interview that appeared to throw into disarray his administration’s agenda. ‘Just to step back for a second, when he made those comments, he was walking through the Detroit car show, the halls of the Detroit car show, he was looking around. We have to remember the last time that they had held that event was three years ago,’ Karine Jean-Pierre said during an appearance on MSNBC Wednesday. ‘We are in a different time. He’s been very consistent about that.’”

As Dan McLaughlin wrote in July, “Biden could put a stop to the public walkbacks immediately by firing one or more people for publicly contradicting him. There are two overlapping reasons why he hasn’t done that: He isn’t willing to stand up to his own staff, and at some level, he grasps that they keep walking back things that he should never have said in the first place. If you have spent much time around elderly men with declining faculties, you will recognize the all-too-common pattern of lashing out because they need help for things they could once do themselves, rather than being thankful for the help.”

WHITE HOUSE SAYS COVID-19 POLICY UNCHANGED DESPITE WHAT PRESIDENT BIDEN SAID ON 60 MINUTES:

As Twitchy reported, President Joe Biden was interviewed by Scott Pelley for Sunday night’s edition of “60 Minutes,” and he said that U.S. men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. After the interview, however, the White House said that its Taiwan policy had not changed. Biden also declared that the COVID-19 pandemic “is over,” although that would scuttle his loophole allowing student loan cancellation because of the emergency imposed by the pandemic.

As with the Taiwan comments, the White House is walking back the “pandemic is over” talk, saying that the White House’s policy remains unchanged and emergency orders are still in effect.

As Jim Treacher asks, who’s running the show inside the “Biden” White House? “It sure isn’t Kamala. And Jill — excuse me, Doctor Jill — is just barely more lucid than her husband. Who’s the boss of that house? Ron Klain? Susan Rice? Ex-PFC Wintergreen? What the hell is going on?”

Related: Democrats Hit the Airwaves to Walk Back Biden’s Pandemic Admission.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Corporate Media Enable Biden Family Corruption By Refusing To Ask Tough Questions About Hunter.

It’s no secret that Joe, while he was still vice president, met with more than a dozen of Hunter’s business associates. Some of those meetings were even held in the West Wing of the White House. Yet, Joe has repeatedly lied about his knowledge of Hunter’s overseas business dealings.

[Scott] Pelley had the perfect opportunity to press Joe on why he lied, what happened in those West Wing meetings, and how involved he’s been brokering deals that the whole Biden family, including Joe’s brother James, reaped the benefits of. Instead, Pelley chose not to press the president.

Pelley’s reluctance to ask tough questions about Hunter is deliberate and straight out of the corporate media handbook.

The corrupt press knew Hunter was sealing deals using his dad’s name and title. They also knew that was compromising for the then-presidential candidate. That’s why when Hunter’s laptop with information indicating Joe was not as clueless about Hunter’s business as he seemed surfaced shortly before the 2020 election, the media claimed it was “Russian disinformation” and refused to cover any of the corruption.

Pelley’s refusal to make Joe answer for the Biden family business in a 2022 “60 Minutes” interview is no different than the media’s deliberate memory holing of Hunter’s depravity and the Bidens’ wheeling and dealings in 2020.

Hey, it is Scott Pelley and CBS after all.

GIVE HIM AN INCH:

I would be embarrassed to conduct an interview with the president that was as lame as Scott Pelley’s lovefest with President Biden on 60 Minutes last night. The Biden administration accorded Pelley a substantial amount of time to chat with Biden and Pelley returned the favor with a variety of softballs and dropped balls as well as his own apologetics — to no one’s surprise, of course, but still. It was an embarrassment.

CBS has posted the transcript here. NewsBusters covers the Biden segments in “State-Run TV: 60 Minutes Drools Over Biden in Syrupy Interview.”

The lack of follow-up questions was one striking feature of the interview. You’d almost think that Pelley himself doesn’t follow the news. He appears to be somewhat less knowledgeable than the average voter.

And not for the first time: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in his Favor.

—Instapundit, April 2nd, 2017.

Related: “As Biden told us, the proof is in the pudding. Unfortunately for America, that pudding is between his ears,” Jim Treacher writes, adding, “This is why Biden doesn’t give many interviews. Every time he speaks into a microphone is worse than the last. He’s writing the Republicans’ ads for them:”

Tonight, Biden said those who think he is unfit for office should just “watch” him.

Let’s roll the tape. pic.twitter.com/ktrTtpHrLa

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 19, 2022

PAST PERFORMANCE IS…WELL, PRETTY CONSISTENT, ACTUALLY:

Shot: CBS Warns GOP Midterm Wins One of the ‘Top Global Risks’ in 2022.

On Tuesday, CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil and Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer sounded the alarm over the possibility of Republicans winning big in the 2022 midterm elections, something they hysterically labeled one of “the top global risks” in the year ahead. The pair claimed any GOP victory in the midterms or the 2024 presidential contest would be seen as “illegitimate.”

“A new report is detailing what it says are the biggest risks facing the globe in 2022 and the findings may surprise you,” Dokoupil declared. Turning to Bremmer, he touted: “Number three, midterm elections here in the U.S., a top risk for 2022. How come?”

In reply, Bremmer wailed:

Well, maybe the least of the surprises. This is the most important midterm election in American history. We have January 6 coming up in just a day and as you know, since the profoundly challenged elections of 2020, no lessons have been learned at all in the United States. The country is much more divided and a large number of Americans, 64% in an NPR poll yesterday, say they thought the United States’ democracy was in crisis.

He went on to specifically identify the Republican Party as the source of the supposed global threat: “…the United States has an election process that is increasingly broken, increasingly delegitimized. And the midterm elections, especially if you have significant win for a Trump-led Republican Party, means that 2024 is going to be seen as illegitimate and potentially a constitutional crisis.”

—NewsBusters, today.

Chaser: Then-New Host of Face the Nation Advised Obama in 2013 to ‘Destroy the GOP:’

John Dickerson, replacing Bob Schieffer as the new host of Face the Nation, will continue the same level of objectivity that CBS has brought to viewers for half a century. In 1964, when CBS was one third of all television news, Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr repeatedly smeared Barry Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi. His successor, Dan Rather, blew himself up in spectacular fashion with RatherGate in 2004, as dissected by all those bloggers in their Pajamas, to coin a Website name. In 2007, Rather’s successor, Scott Pelley, violating 32 flavors of Godwin’s Law in the same fashion as Cronkite, “was asked why he refused to include global warming skeptics in his reporting. He responded, ‘If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’”, as NewsBusters noted.

—Ed Driscoll.com, April 12, 2015.

Today, CBS no doubt views 2015 as the good old days of the GOP. If Republicans do take back the House in November, will CBS declare that “The voters had a temper tantrum last week,” as the late Peter Jennings of ABC said in November of 1994, or will they declare the elections “illegitimate” as CNN’s Ana Navarro did today: Ana Navarro Says Donald Trump Was Illegitimately Elected in 2016 During Wild Rant on The View.

LET OMICRON SPELL THE END OF THE PANDEMIC—AND THE COVID SHAMING:

“As an ultra-cautious, triple vaccinated, always-masker I was shocked and very afraid,” another tweeted. “To my surprise, I also felt ashamed. And embarrassed. How could *I* have let this happen? How could *I* have put my family at risk?”

These people want you to know they are the “good” Americans, those who wear two or three masks, didn’t see family, travel or socialize for two years, and didn’t leave their houses. “We did everything right,” followed all the rules, and still got it!

It’s the new confessional, not Catholic but COVID. “Forgive me, Dr. Fauci, for I have sinned,” they cry out. And it’s not just individual citizens that are posting their COVID Confessions. It’s politicians and public health officials, journalists and other public figures. And it’s really weird.

These tweets and the culture they emerged from betray the truth about much of the “fight” against COVID that liberals seem unable to let go of, even when the virus comes for them. Rather than admit that a virus doesn’t care about your virtue, they experience getting infected with COVID as shameful—because they wanted others to feel shame.

Note the notifications of deaths, either “with” or “from” COVID, that dutifully include an announcement of the deceased’s vaccination status. Is this to avoid ghoulish trolls mocking those who chose not to, or could not take the vaccine? Or public proof that the deceased did the “right” thing and was therefore a moral person and not to blame for their own demise?

Since when in human history has someone’s vaccination status ever been included in an obituary? These obligatory COVID/Vaccine Acknowledgement Statements are like some kind of new Land Acknowledgements for the COVID Zero faithful. If only blue state liberals could acknowledge the truth: that no one should feel guilt or shame for getting a highly infectious disease.

After all, we don’t shame people for getting chickenpox or seasonal influenza or any number of other highly contagious respiratory viruses or diseases. It’s something many liberals actually know in other contexts; they would never shame someone for getting an illness that is even related to their behavior, like obesity, alcoholism and some forms of diabetes. Why is this a thing with COVID?

Reason’s Matt Welch has the answer to that question: RIP, ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’

I’LL TAKE BREAKING NEWS FROM 1964, ALEX. Admitting It: CBS Cheers 1619 Project, Touts Idea That Journalism Should Be Activism.

To be fair, this is the network that brought you Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Scott Pelley.

Related: Megyn Kelly Roasts Nikole Hannah-Jones for ‘1619 Project’ Lies.

FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU RATHERGATE:

● CBS Deceptively Edits Reporter’s Interaction With FL Governor Ron DeSantis. Here’s What He Really Said.

—The Daily Wire, Sunday.

● CBS ‘News’ Deletes Tweet Advocating How Companies Can Oppose Georgia Republicans.

● CBS’s Soft Hunter Biden Interview Downgrades Scandals to ‘Rumors,’ Promotes Book.

—NewsBusters, Sunday.

Back in 2017, 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley had this gaslighting moment with blogger/Twitter user Mike Cernovich:

Scott Pelley: How would you describe what you do?

Mike Cernovich: I’m a lawyer, author, documenter, filmmaker, and journalist.

Scott Pelley: And how would you describe your website?

Mike Cernovich: Edgy, controversial content that goes against the dominant narrative.

Scott Pelley: What’s the dominant narrative?

Mike Cernovich: The dominant narrative is that there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are liberals. Everybody on the right is a bad guy. Let’s find a way to make everybody look bad. Let’s tie marginal figures who have no actual influence to anybody we cannot overwrite. That’s the narrative.

Scott Pelley: That’s not a narrative I’m familiar with. Who’s narrative is that?

Whatever gets you through the night, Scott.

(Bumped.)

IN MUST-WATCH CLIP, TRUMP ATTORNEY “MICHAEL VAN DER VEEN, CITIZEN” DESTROYS MEDIA:

[CBS News anchor Lana Zak] seemingly didn’t know what to say, and wanted to follow up on van der Veen’s assertion that the House managers doctored evidence.

To be clear for our viewers, what you’re talking about now is a checkmark that’s a verification on Twitter that did not exist on that particular tweet, a 2020 that should have actually read 2021, and the selective editing, you say, of the tapes. Is that how — is that the doctored evidence of what you’re speaking?

At that point, van der Veen is all of us when he lost it on her.

Wait, wait, wait, wait…that’s not enough for you? That’s not enough for you?

Zak indignantly jumped in to argue with him, not believing that he dared to question her.

It’s not okay to doctor a little bit of evidence. The media has to start telling the right story in this country. The media is trying to divide this country. You are bloodthirsty for ratings, and as such, you’re asking questions now that are already set up with a fact pattern. I can’t believe you would ask me a question indicating that it’s alright just to doctor a little bit of evidence. There’s more stuff we uncovered that they doctored, to be frank with you, and maybe that will come out someday.

To be fair, accepting faked evidence from the government par for the course from the network that brought you Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Scott Pelley.

PETER HITCHENS: “Covid ‘denier’ is a disgusting, dog-whistle slur:”

[I]t’s a revolting, dog-whistle slur, designed to suggest the person involved is equivalent to those who deny the Shoah took place. One of the first principles of political argument is that if you are explaining, you are losing. So my response to this is not to explain. If anybody actually thinks I am a denier of the Holocaust, let them say so somewhere public, where we can deal with it.

He’s not wrong — it’s simply an extension of the old “climate denier” slur: In January 2007, CBS’s Scott Pelley “was asked why he refused to include global warming skeptics in his reporting. He responded, ‘If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’”

JIM TREACHER: Obama Really Knew How to Handle Putin, According to Obama.

Obama then claims that he allowed Putin to rant for 45 minutes without interrupting, as if he had any say in the matter. And then, Obama claims he debated Putin point-by-point for two hours. Don’t you just love science fiction?

This anecdote is particularly amusing to students of history, which at this point includes anyone who remembers anything that happened before 5:30 PM yesterday. All the way back in 2012, Obama scolded Mitt Romney with this immortal soundbite:

 

I’ve watched that clip dozens of times over the years, and my favorite part is Obama fumbling over his rehearsed talking points. “Okay, it was… uh… foreign policies of the 1980s, and then… oh yeah, the social policies of the 1950s… er…”

And that was after Obama’s 2009 “debate” with Putin. So I guess Barry thought he had bested his opponent. But then the 2016 election happened, and suddenly Putin was the Boogeyman again. Now libs blame the evil Russkies for everything.* Somehow, within the space of four years, Russia went from forgotten has-beens to America’s #1 enemy all over again. And all it took was a Democrat losing an election. Weird how that works, huh?

Related: Obama Calls for More Big Tech ‘Fact-Checking’ in Wake of Trump Getting 71M Votes.

Former President Barack Obama lamented the fact that President Donald Trump won 71 million votes in the 2020 election, blaming the “current media environment” for a supposed lack of an “informed citizenry.” He called for “the media” and “the tech companies” to “inform the public better” and “separate truth from fiction.” Obama said this just as Facebook, Twitter, and legacy media outlets have worked to bury or undermine important stories like the Hunter Biden emails and the irregularities in the 2020 election.

Of course, Obama chooses a venue where he’s not going to get fact-checked: “Obama — who droned weddings & targeted journalists — compares [Trump] to a dictator who thinks, ‘I can kill people. I can throw them in jail. … I can suppress journalists,’” while DNC operative with a lavalier Scott Pelley remains silent.

DISPATCHES FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU RATHERGATE:

● Shot: Ha! CBS News President Claims ‘We Are Unbiased, We Are Seeking the Truth.’

—NewsBusters, Friday.

● Chaser: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in his Favor.

—Instapundit, April 2nd, 2017.

● Hangover: CBS News: ‘According to a leading climate scientist, four more years of a Trump Administration is ‘game over’ for the climate.’

—Climate Depot, today.

Wait, how are we still alive today? President [Obama] ‘has four years to save Earth.’

—The Grauniad, January 17, 2009.

YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Three Inconvenient Truths 60 Minutes Forgot to Mention in Its Story on California Wildfires and Climate Change.

CBS journalist Scott Pelley recently visited Butte County, California, to report on the wildfires devastating the Golden State.

Government statistics show that more than 8,300 wildfires have burned some 4 million acres to date. The flames have claimed 31 lives and destroyed nearly 8,700 structures. One of those structures belonged to Fire Station 61 Chief Reed Rankin, who saw his home reduced to a charred skeleton after a September blaze.

“[It’s] nothin’ but a foundation with a metal roof on top of it,” Rankin, who has spent more than 28 years as a firefighter, told Pelley. “It’s completely burned down.”

CBS had a wonderful opportunity to explore the devastating impact and causes of California’s fires. Unfortunately, it was an opportunity missed. The 60 Minutes segment focused primarily on climate change, a topic that is covered in depth virtually every single day.

California’s historic wildfires received scant attention, and all but the most attuned viewers would have concluded that the wildfires are simply the result of global warming. That’s because Pelley spent a total of seven seconds of the 13-minute segment explaining a primary cause of California’s megafires.

“Climate isn’t the only reason,” Pelley says of the wildfires at one point. “Decades of aggressively putting out every forest fire allowed brush to pile up like kindling.”

Pelley is correct. There is a widespread scientific consensus that California’s aggressive efforts to suppress fire have made the state ripe for megafires. But this is the last 60 Minutes viewers hear on the mismanagement of California’s forests.

Unexpectedly, as they say at Bloomberg.com: CBS ‘Global Warming Special’ Host [Scott Pelley] Likened Warming Skeptics to Holocaust Deniers.