60 Minutes

Marjorie Taylor Greene Interview on 60 Minutes Was a Propaganda – and Ratings – Flop

Posted by on April 3, 2023 at 1:46 pm. 2 Comments :

On Sunday night CBS News humiliated itself by presenting a sappy personal profile of Republican QAnon representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene, on its perennial news magazine, 60 Minutes. The interview was conducted by Lesley Stahl who, while having a renowned reputation as a journalist, made some amateurish mistakes in both her questioning and framing of the extremist congresswoman.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene, QAnon

The interview was rife with flagrant falsehoods by Greene, along with her attempts to rewrite history (videos below). She denied her grossly offensive comments about Democrats, about whom she used tortured and twisted logic to malign as pedophiles. She refuted her prior statements approving of shooting Nancy Pelosi. She pretended that she had nothing to do with posts on her Twitter account asserting that the mass shooting at the Parkland school was a “false flag” operation by gun safety advocates. That’s not the first time that she made that charge. She said the same thing about the mass shooting in Las Vegas.

All of these, as well as many other disgusting sentiments, were well documented and a few were displayed on screen as Greene issued her denials. And anyone who has been paying attention knows the depths to which Greene’s extremism descends.

RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene Floats Fascist Proposal for Red States to Prohibit Democrats From Voting

The good news is that Green’s interview was not widely disseminated. The Nielsen ratings for 60 Minutes Sunday night were the second lowest for the season to date. And this episode was 33% lower than last weeks episode. Greene was the headliner for the program and, thus, is entitled to full credit for its failure.

Apparently America wasn’t interested in tuning in to her bullpucky. Perhaps fittingly, Nielsen reported that 6.66 million people watched the show. That’s an audience figure that should please the demonic demographic within the Republican Party.

It was irresponsible for CBS to give Greene a virtually unchallenged platform to advance her crackpot conspiracy theories. Stahl should make a point of following up the interview with a fact check and rebuttal on next week’s program. That probably won’t happen. But at least we can be encouraged by the low interest of American TV viewers in Greene’s gibberish and lies. Hopefully the only thing that people remember from this interview is how nuts the GOP has become to elevate someone like Greene.

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Trump has an Epically Unhinged Ego Eruption After His Defense Secretary Exposes His Madness

Posted by on May 9, 2022 at 2:46 pm. 6 Comments :

On Sunday’s episode of “60 Minutes,” Donald Trump’s former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, was interviewed to discuss some of the explosive accounts of Trump’s unstable and dangerous behavior as president that Esper disclosed in his book, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.”

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Donald Trump, Fox News, QAnon

Esper appeared on 60 Minutes to promote the book that he said he wrote “to tell the story about things we prevented. Really bad things. Dangerous things that could have taken the country a dark direction.” Among those things were that Trump sought to conduct military strikes against Venezuela and Iran, and to blockade Cuba. Esper also revealed that Trump had asked him about using the military to attack American citizens engaging in peaceful protests. “Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked Esper. “Just shoot them in the legs or something.”

RELATED: Trump Shill Calls Violent Insurrectionists ‘Unwitting,’ Peaceful Abortion Protesters ‘Terrorists’

It was that latter heinous suggestion that Trump responded to in a laughably demented letter to “60 Minutes.” Esper was asked about a cabinet meeting at the White House where Trump indicated that he “wanted to shoot some of the protesters in the legs, a lot of foul language was used and accused president Trump of calling members of the cabinet ‘f’ing losers.'”

Trump’s letter to “60 Minutes” contained a thoroughly bizarre response that reflected his psychotic ego and malignant narcissism. Trump wrote that…

“This is a complete lie and 10 witnesses can back it up. Mark Esper was weak and totally ineffective, and because of it, I had to run the military. I took out ISIS, Qasem Soleimani, al-Baghdadi, rebuilt the military with $2.5 trillion, created Space Force, and so much more. Mark Esper was a stiff who was desperate not to lose his job. He would do anything I wanted, that’s why I called him ‘Yesper.’ He was a lightweight and figurehead, and I realized it very early on. He was recommended to me by some very weak RINOs and that is what he turned out to be.”

As with anything that Trump disputes, he calls this a “complete lie.” He was surely thinking it was also a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” True to form, Trump dismissed Esper as “weak and totally ineffective.” If that sounds familiar it’s because Trump has a perverse pattern of turning against his closest associates and bitterly insulting them when they are not sufficiently worshipful. It’s interesting that so many of his top White House and cabinet appointees were weak, incompetent, losers. So much for “only the best people,” as he promised.

Among those who have been the victims of Trump’s deranged ire were Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Bill Barr, Michael Cohen, Stephanie Grisham, Gen. Mark Milley, John Bolton, Gen. Jim Mattis, Anthony Scaramucci, Steve Bannon, Omarosa, and Gen. H.R. McMaster. It’s almost as if he only hires weak incompetents or slobbering sycophants.

As for Trump’s contention that he has “10 witnesses” to back him up, the only response to that is…Yeah, right! Funny that he doesn’t identify a single one. And his claim that he derisively called Esper “Yesper” is preposterous. Since when has Trump ever been bothered by anyone who would always say “yes” to him?

RELATED: Fiona Hill: There’s No Team America for Trump. Not Once Did I See Him Do Anything to Put America First

Trump, however wasn’t through. In his letter he elaborated with the raving lunacy that he had to “run the military” himself, and that he personally “took out ISIS” and other terrorist leaders. How he did that while fighting crime, clamping down on the communist Democrats, inventing the COVID vaccines, and building a border wall with his own hands, is a whole other story. Trump also lied about offering 10,000 troops to Pelosi prior to the January 6th insurrection. And he had an uncharacteristic “No comment” when asked about his illegal proposal to attack drug cartels by firing missiles into Mexico, a violation of international law. Which actually says a lot.

At this rate it won’t be long until we see Trump in a Napoleon hat claiming to have conquered the entire world and becoming its emperor. Or worse, its messiah. It’s bad enough that too many of his glassy-eyed disciples already see him as that.

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Trump Spends Most of the 60 Minutes Interview Lying and Whining About the Media

Posted by on October 22, 2020 at 1:02 pm. 5 Comments :

While awaiting the final presidential debate of 2020, Donald Trump is obsessing over a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl that won’t air until Sunday. Well, it ordinarily wouldn’t air, but Trump took it upon himself to release his own video in violation of his agreement with CBS.

Donald Trump Angry

On Thursday morning Trump pounded out some tweets referring to the interview. True to form, Trump displayed a familiar attitude of weakness and victimhood as he sought to portray Stahl as a big meanie who was out to get him. He whimpered that…

“I will soon be giving a first in television history full, unedited preview of the vicious attempted “takeout” interview of me by Lesley Stahl of @60Minutes. Watch her constant interruptions & anger. Compare my full, flowing and “magnificently brilliant” answers to their “Q’s”.

And…

“Look at the bias, hatred and rudeness on behalf of 60 Minutes and CBS. Tonight’s anchor, Kristen Welker, is far worse!”

If this is what Trump thinks is anger, hatred, and rudeness, he really is a fragile little snowflake. But that’s been glaringly apparent for years. In addition to this petulant grumbling, Trump has also blatantly violated the agreement he made with 60 Minutes not to release any video prior to the Sunday evening broadcast. CBS reacted to this breach of contract in a press release chastising his “unprecedented decision to disregard their agreement.” But anyone who expects Trump to behave ethically hasn’t been paying attention.

The interview itself was a shipload of lies (video below). Trump claimed repeatedly that he already has a healthcare plan (that he still refuses to reveal) to replace the Affordable Care Act, even as he expresses his desire that the Supreme Court strike down Obamacare. He also said that he doesn’t know anything about Steve Bannon (his former campaign chairman) and Rudy Giuliani (his current personal attorney) or their smear campaign against the Biden family. Never mind that he’s been talking and tweeting about it ever since it surfaced in the right-wing press. Trump repeated his frequent lie that the Obama administration spied on him. And that’s just the tip of iceberg.

Let’s set aside the voluminous lies that Trump told during this interview. That’s business as usual for Trump. He also spent much of the time complaining about Stahl and the media instead of answering the questions. She struggled, mostly in vain, to get him to stick to the subject. But his mind wandered aimlessly through a forest of incoherence as he tried desperately to deflect every inquiry into some form of media bashing. For instance…

In response to a question he obviously didn’t like, Trump began his reply attacking Stahl’s tone, saying that “The way you said that is why people think of you and everyone else as fake news.” When she pointed out the fallacy of Trump’s claim that his recent cult rallies are “the biggest rallies we’ve ever had,” (they aren’t), he responded with a brittle “You’re so negative.” And in a tired old complaint Trump whined that “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have social media. Because the media is corrupt. In my opinion the media is corrupt. The media is fake. And frankly, if I didn’t have social media I’d have no way of getting out my voice.” That’s the alleged “President” of the United States saying that he has no platform for communicating with the public.

Trump raised several objections that centered around his jealousy of Joe Biden. “You don’t ask Biden tough questions,” Trump cried. “I wish you would interview Joe Biden like you interview me. […] You’re like big tech. You’re protecting him. And everyone is. Except for a few people.” Trump complained again about being asked “tough questions.” Then he falsely claimed that “When you set up the interview you didn’t say that. You said ‘Oh, let’s have a lovely interview.'” Yeah sure, that’s what veteran journalist Lesley Stahl said. Then Trump whines again that Biden has never been asked a hard question. And shortly thereafter Trump concludes that his suffering was too much and decides to run away saying “That’s enough. Let’s go.”

Somehow, Trump’s cult disciples continue to view Trump as a pillar of strength. That’s an extraordinarily perverse image of a man who is so clearly a weakling and a coward. There has never been an American leader who wallows so deeply in victimhood. However, he does have much to fear now. He’s about to be resoundingly defeated for reelection. And after that he is likely to face multiple civil and criminal trials. So maybe we should cut him some slack if he’s trembling at the prospect of his crumbling future. Nah, let’s not. He brought it on himself, and it’s what he deserves.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

CBS Edits Out Gun Discussion On Obama’s 60 Minutes Interview

Posted by on October 13, 2015 at 7:43 pm. 2 Comments :

The myth of the “liberal” media has been thoroughly debunked by volumes of evidence, and yet many people continue to believe that news operations owned and operated by giant multinational corporations still harbor a liberal bias for some unexplained, and unexplainable, reason.

The latest proof that Big Media slants their coverage away from true progressive issues comes from last Sunday’s broadcast of 60 Minutes on CBS. The twenty-four minute interview of President Obama was sufficient time to cover a variety of subjects that have a real impact on the lives of real Americans. However, one subject was left on the cutting room floor: The crisis of gun violence (video below).

60 Minutes

The fact that CBS found time in an interview of Obama for an extended discussion of Hillary Clinton’s email server, but was unable include a brief segment of the gun dialog, says something about the editorial decision making at the network. If you wanted to know what Obama thought about how guns affect our society, and what can be done about it, you would have had to search for it online. What you would have found was a three minute segment that could easily have been slipped into the CBS broadcast. And it’s fair to say that this issue holds more value for the American people than adding to the tabloid sensationalism that Fox News has been feverishly stirring up about emails that have uncovered no wrongdoing whatsoever.

This sort of bias is not new to CBS or 60 Minutes. In 2013 they ran a story about Benghazi that was so full of holes that they had to retract it and apologize for airing such an embarrassing and obvious hoax. At that time News Corpse published an explanation for how CBS could have been taken in by such a conspicuous fraud. That explanation revolves around the personalities in the network’s executive suites who are still running the newsroom. This is what I wrote in November of 2013:

The President of CBS News is David Rhodes, who assumed the post in February of 2011. His bio on the CBS website tells us something of his professional past:

“Rhodes began his career as a Production Assistant at the newly-launched Fox News Channel in 1996, where he later became Vice President of News. At the network he managed coverage of three presidential elections, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, hurricanes including Katrina, and was the channel’s Assignment Manager on the news desk the morning of September 11, 2001.”

What this tells us is that Rhodes was a top executive at Fox News during the hotly contested 2000 presidential election where Fox mistakenly called the state of Florida (and thus the nation) for George W. Bush. He was there when Fox News was cheerleading for the U.S. to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and did not pose any threat to America. He was there when Fox was defending Bush’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. He was there during the economic meltdown of 2008 to make sure that it was blamed on poor people buying homes and the Democrats in Congress. He was there when Fox was hyping electoral attacks against candidate Obama that included maligning ACORN, advancing associations with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, and of course, the everlasting nonsense of birtherism.

In short, Rhodes was one of the principal architects of the Fox News slant toward far-right extremism and brazen conservative partisanship. CBS News must have known what they were getting when they hired him.

So is it any wonder that CBS would focus so sharply on dramatic, but insubstantial controversies? They clearly have an editorial mission to push a conservative agenda and suppress any progressive initiatives for reform. The same sort of problems exist at other networks and news outlets. The current executive vice president of CNN, Ken Jautz, is the man who gave Glenn Beck his first job on television. Even MSNBC is heading toward the right as they remove progressive hosts and plan to expand Morning Joe another hour. Which is why I say “Liberal media my ass.”

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The CBS ’60 Minutes’ Benghazi Hoax Was Overseen By A Former Fox News Executive

Posted by on November 10, 2013 at 4:02 pm. 10 Comments :

The biggest media story of the week was clearly the confession by CBS that their big Benghazi Hoax on 60 Minutes had relied on a disreputable figure who had lied to pretty much everyone involved. CBS has now apologized for the broadcast and will issue a correction on the air tonight.

But the question of how the network could have fallen for what in retrospect appears to be a transparent fraud still lingers. The evidence of the falsehoods in their source’s account were easily discovered by reporters who bothered to look. The explanation for CBS’s failure to do so may lie in the identity of the executives in charge of the network’s news operations.

CBS News David Rhodes
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The President of CBS News is David Rhodes, who assumed the post in February of 2011. His bio on the CBS website tells us something of his professional past:

“Rhodes began his career as a Production Assistant at the newly-launched Fox News Channel in 1996, where he later became Vice President of News. At the network he managed coverage of three presidential elections, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, hurricanes including Katrina, and was the channel’s Assignment Manager on the news desk the morning of September 11, 2001.”

What this tells us is that Rhodes was a top executive at Fox News during the hotly contested 2000 presidential election where Fox mistakenly called the state of Florida (and thus the nation) for George W. Bush. He was there when Fox News was cheerleading for the U.S. to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and did not pose any threat to America. He was there when Fox was defending Bush’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. He was there during the economic meltdown of 2008 to make sure that it was blamed on poor people buying homes and the Democrats in Congress. He was there when Fox was hyping electoral attacks against candidate Obama that included maligning ACORN, advancing associations with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, and of course, the everlasting nonsense of birtherism.

In short, Rhodes was one of the principal architects of the Fox News slant toward far-right extremism and brazen conservative partisanship. CBS News must have known what they were getting when they hired him. Additionally, 60 Minutes correspondent, Lara Logan, has been known to swing rightward, particularly with regard to a militaristic foreign policy.

Following the 60 Minutes episode, much of the conservative media rushed to regurgitate the false accounts presented. Chief among them was Fox News where, the day after the broadcast, Fox devoted 47 minutes to heralding the story as validation of their prior reporting on the issue. That’s three times as long as the original story on CBS. Since then they have spent only 26 seconds (yes, seconds) informing their viewers that the story was utterly false. And the Fox News community website and notorious peddler of lies, Fox Nation, didn’t bother to report the CBS retraction at all.

Given the benefit of this perspective, it is not surprising that CBS would allow itself to be cajoled into believing the fabrications of an obvious grifter. There was such an inbred attraction to his distortion of reality that they were willing to disseminate it to their audience without subjecting it to routine scrutiny. The fact that their source was also the author of a book that was being published by a company that CBS owns and is run by a prominent conservative operative, Mary Matalin, should also have been a red flag. Matalin’s company, Threshold Editions (a division of Simon and Schuster) also publishes books by Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney. [The Benghazi book has now been pulled from release].

Fox News Contributor Karl Rove Becomes The Story

Posted by on February 22, 2008 at 1:07 am. NO Comments :

This coming Sunday 60 Minutes will broadcast a report on Alabama’s former governor Don Siegleman. Siegleman is presently serving a seven year jail term for a bribery conviction that is considered suspicious by Democrats and Republicans alike. Many believe that the case was politically engineered by some familiar names in the Dirty Tricks business:

“A Republican operative in Alabama says Karl Rove asked her to try to prove the state’s Democratic governor was unfaithful to his wife in an effort to thwart the highly successful politician’s re-election.”

While the ethical underhandedness of a manufactured prosecution that lands an innocent man in prison is disgusting on its own, there are other questions raised that will likely not be answered by this scandal’s principal player. Karl Rove, Fox News’ newest contributor, has refused requests by 60 Minutes to comment, but he will continue to appear as an election analyst on the Fox News Channel.

What I want to know is: How can this guy appear on Fox air, with reporters questioning him about the presidential campaign, without being made to answer questions about the political controversies swirling around his own life? How can Fox anchors sit next to him, pretending these issues don’t exist, and still be called journalists? Yeah, I know…no one calls them journalists now, but this would be like hiring O.J. Simpson as a crime reporter without ever mentioning Nicole and Ron.

I probably shouldn’t be giving Fox any ideas. After all…

Karl Rove & OJ Simpson…it was the Murdoch- owned ReganBooks that published Simpson’s “If I Did It” and tried to air a shlockumentary based on it on Fox, before they were shamed into ditching the program. Judith Regan was subsequently fired as a sacrifice to protect Murdoch and others who had greenlighted the projects.