The Downfall of 60 Minutes and the Biggest Media Scandal You’ve Never Heard Of
Bill Owens, Obama, Benghazi, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and the rest of the cast of the sordid, rotten characters are all here.
The proximate cause for said encroachments is widely assumed to be politics. According to the Times, “Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison.”
Which is, of course, b*llsh*t
Since Owens joined 60 Minutes, it’s hard to know where to begin cataloging the embarrassments. Its recent defense of Hamas and its refusal to follow past precedent and release an unedited transcript of the show’s interview with Kamala Harris, who is unable to answer basic questions in ways that aren’t insultingly inane, for fear of damaging her electoral chances were just par for the course.
The most notorious incident occurred in 2004, when 60 Minutes started a news revolution, albeit inadvertently, after internet amateurs demonstrated they were often more capable than the most respected corporate news entities. Dan Rather, maybe the biggest name in TV news at the time, breathlessly reported that 60 Minutes had obtained documents showing that political pressure was applied to excuse President George W. Bush’s poor performance in the Texas Air National Guard. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard was already seen as a convenient way of avoiding the Vietnam draft. The report aired just months before Bush’s reelection, where he was running against Sen. John Kerry, who had milked his four months in Vietnam for all it was worth. Critics, however, had rightly noted that Kerry’s account of his service was full of lies and distortions, and this had been a major campaign story. Anything that could further undermine Bush’s National Guard service would be enormously helpful to the Kerry campaign and make his own Vietnam service look more honorable by contrast.
But wait…
When he popped up in the news recently being lauded for his supposed integrity, it took me a while to remember where I’d heard his name. Then I recalled that Owens was smack in the center of an absolutely wild story about Hillary Clinton — and that’s saying something — that might be one of the biggest media scandals you’ve never heard of.
and,
Now interestingly enough, the heat on Hillary Clinton for Benghazi was still such that even 60 Minutes had turned their eye toward an exposé. This culminated in a disastrous report on Benghazi by Lara Logan in the fall of 2013. Logan’s 60 Minutes report had centered on the tale of a private military contractor named Dylan Davies, who claimed to have tried and failed to save the four people killed in Benghazi. He told an accusatory eyewitness tale of how the U.S. government could and should have done more to save the men killed in the attack. Almost as soon as it aired, there were questions about the truth of Davies’ account, which contradicted what he had told his employer, another mercenary outfit called Blue Mountain Group, as well as the State Department. The report completely fell apart and CBS went so far as to remove the transcript of Logan’s report from news services.
Lara Logan is a stellar professional journalist, the real thing, and she was thrown under the bus and backed over by it several times, by CBS and lived to tell about it.
Naturally, all the coverage of the CBS scandal was focused on Logan and didn’t really ask many hard questions about what the hell happened to 60 Minutes‘ vaunted editorial process to allow Logan’s flawed report to make it to air. At this point I’d been following the ProPublica details closely. I had previously done a lot of reporting on the government’s increasing reliance on private military companies during the Iraq War, and the maneuverings of Global Osprey Solutions caught my eye, to say nothing of the fact that anytime Sidney Blumenthal’s name appears in the news it’s a strong indication something is not right.
and this…
In other words, 60 Minutes‘ most high-profile journalistic failure since Rathergate came about not necessarily because Logan failed to do her job. It was more than likely a result of allowing a dubious and manipulative ex-CIA agent to shape their coverage of the Benghazi attack, even though he was concurrently currying favor with Hillary Clinton for personal profit. If you’d asked a celebrated practitioner of the political dark arts such as Sidney Blumenthal and a CIA clandestine operations expert to bump heads and find a way to discredit a 60 Minutesreport that could potentially do real damage to her nascent presidential campaign, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine coming up with an operation just like this.
RTWDT.
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