Scott Pelley seems to have stuck a nerve with his Wake Forest commencement speech. Curtis Houck raged at the “hateful” and “pompous” speech in a May 23 post:
Earlier this week, longtime CBS News anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley gave a commencement address at Wake Forest University that seethed with implicit hate for President Trump and the MAGA movement, telling graduates “freedom of speech,” “journalism,” “our sacred rule of law,” and “universities” are all “under attack” with “an insidious fear” permeating American “businesses,” “homes,” “school[s],” and even “private thoughts.”
Pelley encouraged graduates to rise up, comparing them to Unionists fighting the Confederacy, the Allies fighting the Nazis, and the civil rights movement standing up to segregationists. So, to make sure we’re all on the same page, Pelley believes Trump and tens of millions of supporters are akin to Confederates, Nazis, and segregationists (so the Ku Klux Klan).
As first flagged by our friends at the Washington Free Beacon, the speech was a barnburner. Pelley started by invoking London and specifically a roof in which Edward R. Murrow reported during The Blitz and the statue of George Orwell with the quote “[i]f liberty means anything at all, it means telling someone something that they don’t want to hear.”
He admitted “some people in the audience who don’t want to hear what I have to say today, but I appreciate your forbearance in this small act of liberty.”
[…]After he fawned over three people he believes have illustrated the true “meaning of their lives in a moment of crisis, not unlike what we have today” (including Volodymyr Zelenskyy), Pelley showed he has no understanding of why the public has lost trust in our universities thanks to its place as a home for far-left thought, Marxism, and terrorist sympathizers.
Pelley cheered some comical open letter signed by universities that included the insistence they are beacons of “open inquiry,” the “pursuit of truth,” and home to anyone “without fear of retribution, censorship or deportation.”
If that were the case, it’s likely groups like Turning Point USA and Young America’s Foundation wouldn’t have to exist.
[…]Wake Forest administrators fawned over Pelley before he even gave that speech. Provost Michelle Gillespie declared: “Journalistic integrity is paramount to Mr. Pelley, and his reputation for professionalism, accuracy, and unflinching honesty has facilitated face-to-face conversations with prominent newsmakers and leading voices of our time.”
School president Susan Rae Wente similarly trumpeted the pompous partisan as “a gifted storyteller who can humanize any event, and some of his most riveting narratives are about everyday people” and believes “the people are the story.”
Jeffrey Lord served up his own DEI-obsessed take on the speech in his May 24 column, which somehow morphed into whining that his preferred right-wing narratives didn’t have enough media time until recently:
This latest example would be the case of CBS 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley and his recent commencement speech at Wake Forest University.
Interestingly, Pelley used his speech to set about whacking Paramount, the corporate owner of CBS, with Pelley staunchly defending, of course, those pesky DEI initiatives that Paramount was ditching.
[…]Well now. Ignorance does indeed work for power. And reading Pelley’s description of DEI is a classic of ignorance grasping for power.
It would be most accurate to say that Pelley’s description of this DEI business is considerably different than the way DEI works in reality. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically bans judging Americans by skin color – making it illegal.
[…]And opposition to the “D” in DEI is precisely because it effectively appears to bring back the days when judging Americans by skin color was so widespread it had to be specifically banned.
And “Equity”? Hmmm. Scott Pelley is, as mentioned, an anchor of CBS’s 60 Minutes. But mysteriously, everybody at CBS, not to mention in the larger media and beyond doesn’t get the “equity” of holding that job-or any other. These things are earned, not handed out like candy. The freedom to have hard work is the real equity — not dispensing the same exact rewards to everyone in the name of equity.
And “Inclusion?” It seems in this quarter that the “DEI” movement is anything but “Inclusive.” To cite but one example?
What brought Fox News into existence? The hard fact was that the media as it existed in 1996 – the year Fox went on the air – was completely left-leaning. Inclusivity when it came to political discussion in the media was practically invisible.
The very reason for the creation of Fox as a conservative network was because the lefties running the so-called “mainstream media” were anything but “mainstream. They were not only Left, they wanted no part of anything “Right.” Inclusive they decidedly were not. There were no conservative anchors or commentators of note. All revolved around the liberal political discussions of the day.
Alex Christy spent a May 31 post whining that another CBS newsman praised Pelley’s speech:
On May 19, 60 Minutes’s Scott Pelley went to Wake Forest University to give what was advertised as a commencement speech but in reality was a partisan diatribe warning that President Trump is a threat to all things good and decent. While Pelley urged the graduates to resist Trump, on Friday, colleague John Dickerson urged “all of us” to pay attention to Pelley’s words on CBS Evening News Plus.
Dickerson, who styles himself as a straight newsman, was playing clips from various commencement speeches across the country when he arrived at Pelley, who “spoke to Wake Forest about the urgency of history’s call.”
[…]Still, after a clip of Jon Batiste singing at Brown University, Dickerson wrapped up, “Creative courage, moral integrity, historical urgency, and determination. All a different compass. Not just for graduates, but all of us. And that’s tonight’s CBS Evening News Plus, thank you for joining us. I’m John Dickerson. Good night.”
Actual moral integrity would require Dickerson to claim Pelley was wrong because 2025 is not akin to the Civil War, World War II, or the Civil Rights Movement.
A June 1 “flashback” post by Rich Noyes huffed that Pelley “hijacked the Wake Forest graduation ceremony to vent against Trump administration policies as well as the President’s lawsuit against CBS,” then used it to rehash how other “media celebrities” have allegedly tried “to steal attention away from the achievements of those graduating in order to push their favorite liberal theories.”
Intern Shannon Sauders devoted a June 3 post to the right-wing Fox News “media criticism” show predictably criticizing Pelley’s peech:
On Monday, May 19, Scott Pelley delivered the commencement speech for the class of 2025 at Wake Forest University but used it as a time to show favor to bashing President Trump. Pelley claimed in the speech, “Our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack…Diversity is now described as illegal.”
It’s worth noting that CBS was already in hot water with a lawsuit brought against them by Trump regarding the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris over misleading editing before the election. Pelley continued to dig the hole deeper into revealing their consistent left-wing biases.
[…]Kurtz confronted Pelley and declared, “I just think it’s wildly inappropriate to use a commencement address to say such things, and doesn’t that reinforce the notion that the network is incredibly biased against the President?”
He would be correct. Why would an opportunity to be an inspiration to graduates turn into a left-wing agenda-pushing speech? This was an example of media platforms suppressing their biases onto others for the gain of bashing people they disagree with.
Graduation speeches shouldn’t be used for liberal journalist meltdowns. Bring back encouraging graduation speeches without fearmongering the crowd to believe in left-wing biases.
Neither Sauders nor, apparently, Kurtz noted that Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany demanded that Pelley be arrested for the speech, which would seem to violate the principles of free speech the MRC claims to support. And Sauders failed to mention that Fox News is incredibly biased in favor of Trump, which makes Kurtz’s comments painfully ironic.