The Media Research Center’s whining about “60 Minutes” continued with a May 20 column by Tim Graham:
Anderson Cooper decided to quit his moonlighting job at 60 Minutes, but not without a few words interpreted as “a dig” at CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss.
In an “Overtime” video reviewing his career, Cooper proclaimed “There’s very few things that have been around for as long as 60 Minutes has and maintain the quality that it has,” and “I think the independence of 60 Minutes has been critical.”
Always beware the I-word. “Independence” is a code word for “crusading liberal bias.” We at 60 Minutes demonstrate our “independence” by beating Donald Trump over the head on a weekly basis.
Cooper often didn’t sound “independent” to most of us when interviewing Democrats. Just start with the interview with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in 2022. Sending one famous gay liberal man to interview another famous gay liberal man didn’t sound like it would be hard-hitting, and it wasn’t.
Of course Graham would resort to whataboutism — he would rather those softball questions be tossed to his fellow right-wingers. He continued:
Cooper hasn’t been shy about celebrating CBS, including on CNN. After CNN ran a live performance of George Clooney’s fact-mangling play about CBS heroes in the McCarthy era last summer, Cooper brought on his CBS colleague Scott Pelley for a promotional interview about his anti-Trump commencement speech at Wake Forest. The hour was titled “Truth and Power.”
Graham couldn’t be bothered to identify the title of the play he was attacking — “Good Night, And Good Luck” — and he refused to list the facts the play supposedly “mangled.”
Graham followed up with more whining in a May 26 post:
If you weren’t a political junkie, you could watch actress Sally Field give a 65-second speech at the end of Sunday’s 60 Minutes about the First Amendment and the “brilliance of our Constitution” and think it was like a “Bicentennial Minute” (which CBS aired in 1976).
But we can easily guess that the 60 Squad was making an anti-Trump statement. As the Daily Beast summarized: “CBS News’s flagship program broadcast a call to protect the First Amendment at a time when the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened its integrity.”
Rather than prove Field wrong, Graham engaged in more whataboutism:
That’s a perfectly good moment to celebrate America at 250, but you can easily learn that Sally Field’s social media is distraught over Stephen Colbert leaving CBS. That would suggest why this is airing now. The good people are the leftists, and democracy is fragile because of the conservatives.
Field loves to protest with “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, and has said “I go where she tells me to go…I went to jail for her” after a 2017 climate-change protest. In an Instagram reel from Fonda’s Committee for the First Amendment about Colbert’s CBS show ending, Field said “authoritarians need to get rid of those voices, voices of the people….This is a dark time in our country and I feel certain with all of us, standing up resisting, one day we’ll be on the other side of it….I love and adore you Stephen!”
Field is probably still angry that Trump defeated her feminist hero Hillary Clinton in 2016. Back then, she told Time “I think it’s miraculous that she is female, and it’s almost secondary to the fact that she’s way qualified, would be a brilliant President.”
The next day, Joseph Vazquez weighed in:
The popular CBS news show 60 Minutes just completed a textbook exercise in logical fallacy by hawking the stock market scare porn of CNBC’s arguably most smug anti-Trump anchor that he himself hedged straight into irrelevancy.
60 Minutes published an X post May 24 pushing CNBC Squawk Box co-anchor and part-time Nostradamus Andrew Ross Sorkin joining correspondent Lesley Stahl to give her his crystal ball divinations derived from his 2025 book1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History–and How It Shattered a Nation, which apparently took him 10 years to draft.
He adamantly proclaimed a stock market crash reminiscent of the 1929 disaster is on the horizon, but then immediately walked it back and effectively undercut his entire thesis: “We will have a crash, I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep. But I can assure you, unfortunately, I wish I wasn’t saying this, we will have a crash.” Oh. So in other words, he knows nothing. But Stahl predictably let him coast on that logic, since both hinted that President Trump hitched his entire presidency to the performance of the stock market.
Rather than disprove that claim, Vazquez gloated when the stock market hit a new high:
Just three days after CBS broadcast Sorkin’s 60 Minutes prognosticating, the Dow Jones shot up 300 points to notch a new record as oil prices started nosediving on news of a potential peace agreement between Iran and the United States for the ongoing war. The day prior, both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite indexes completed record closes at 7,519.12 and 26,656.18 respectively, according to — oh this is hilarious — CNBC! Earth to Sorkin!
Vazquez concluded by huffing: “Sorkin’s predictions have about as much utility as when CNN prophesied based on a single snapshot on volatile oil futures that we wouldn’t see sub-$70 per barrel prices until 2032: Zero!” Given that gas prices have continued to remain high due to Trump’s war in Iran, Sorkin’s prophecy has not exactly been debunked.