Believe it or not, the Media Research Center still wasn’t done beating up on Scott Pelley for getting fired from “60 Minutes.” Curtis Houck sneered in a June 4 post:
CNN’s The Lead host Jake Tapper leaned on his sanctimonious reputation late Wednesday afternoon as he devoted the first 14 minutes to huffing about CBS News firing longtime 60 Minutescorrespondent Scott Pelley for his petulant reenactment of Pickett’s Charge, thinking he could eviscerate his bosses and intimidate them in his “house.”
For the second of three segments, Tapper turned to former ABC colleague Terry Moran and former CBS January 6 correspondent-turned-MeidasTouch host Scott MacFarlane. Both are now at Substack.
MacFarlane went first, declaring “[n]obody wins if 60 Minutes is damaged” because “[i]t’s still one of those rare media entities, Jake, that can cut through the noise and cut through the clutter.”
He then embarrassingly referred to Pelley as “the living Mount Rushmore at CBS News” and that, speaking for himself, he wasn’t known at CBS as “Scott” because that name had “reverence” reserved for Pelley.
Yes, Houck is still bizarrely obsessed with the fact that MacFarlane covered criminal cases involving the Capitol riot while at CBS. He continued to sneer:
Drool was missing from Moran’s shirt as he said this about Pelley’s fellow fired colleagues: “They fired Cecilia Vega and Sharon Alfonso, two fearless, bold journalists, troublemakers. I mean, in a good way, good trouble, right, as John Lewis used to say.”
Tapper presented MacFarlane with the reality that “polls do suggest that the media trust is at an all-time low” and wondered if he saw any validity in that widespread belief in legacy media having “an anti-Trump spin, liberal spin.”
[…]Moran hurled predictable venom in his heart for half the country, arguing we’re too partisan and stupid to appreciate what he believes is real journalism: “I think chasing MAGA audiences are a fool’s errand because they don’t want the kind of journalism that 60 Minutes does, which is in-depth and straight and fearless. They want the journalism that flatters their own prejudices.”
Houck, of course, is mum on just how partisan he is. He whined further with a fit of Stelter derangement in defense of partisan CBS News chief Bari Weiss:
Stelter put into the ether the self-feeding narrative he and his fellow media reporting class have created with their own supposed reporting: “Certainly, these have been some self-inflicted wounds at CBS News, and this is not the first one. The overhaul of the Evening News was also highly controversial and picked apart months ago.”
He also shared with Tapper his CBS sources told him “they believe…some of those staffers” crying over Pelley’s firing “are stubborn and sanctimonious.”
“I would say not just many, but most TV news veterans believe that even if Weiss has the right instincts and is trying to do the right things, she has gone about it the right the wrong way. Maybe the right moves, but the wrong way,” he added, reinforcing this feedback loop that Weiss’s alleged disrespect of and refusal to embrace old kingmakers has put her on thin ice.
Clay Waters ranted in the headline of his post that Pelley and fellow ex-correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi were “lefty hacks”:
Wednesday’s PBS News Hour brought on former veteran CBS 60 Minutesreporter Steve Kroft — the man behind a series of Obama interviews so embarrassing the MRC penned a Special Report about them — to defend the media’s self-anointed golden hour, the long-time Sunday newsmagazine which has suffered ideologically motivated convulsions and now firings of prominent journalists, most recently Scott Pelley.
This came after last year’s takeover of CBS News by Bari Weiss, who has stated the desire to broaden the audience for CBS News programming and combat the perception of liberal bias.
Further bolstering Weiss’s argument for said changes, Bennett and Kroft commiserated over the prospect of a “weaker, less independent or less ambitious” 60 Minutes.
[…]Incidentally, it wasn’t Pelley’s long history of liberal propaganda that got him canned, but his throwing a toddler tantrum toward his boss in public, a reliable way to lose one’s job:
Says a guy whose job it is to peddle right-wing propaganda, so of course Waters believes anyone who’s not as far-right as he is must be a “lefty hack.” He kept up the whining:
Referring to Alfonsi, Pelley, and Vega, Kroft cast doubt on the shows future because they’re “the kind of people you would need if you wanted to continue to put a program like CBS’s 60 Minuteson the air” featuring “incredibly good journalists.”
Alfonsi is not an “incredibly good journalist.” Besides a lead-off controversy over Weiss insisting Alfonsi get the White House’s side of an El Salvador deportation story, Alfonsi had previously proved herself a partisan hack by confronting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with a phony pay-for-play scandal during COVID, and showed herself no friend of free speech in a story delighting in Germany sending people to jail for online wrong-think.
Given that the substance of Alfonsi’s story on the CECOT prison in El Salvador did not change in the months that Weiss put it on ice, it seems the Waters doth protest too much. And we’re not sure how Waters twisted a story about the spread of hate speech got twisted into “wrong-think,” as if the hate and racism featured in the report must be allowed to stand without comment.
Houck went on to guest-host the June 4 MRC podcast, mixing his hatred for Pelley with gushing over a MRC award recipient:
NewsBusters Associate Editor Nick Fondacaro and I were joined by 2026 MRC Bulldog Award winner for Outstanding Reporter Jennie Taer of the Daily Wire to discuss her latest news-breaking scoops on the immigration beat. She shared her latest exclusive on the left’s latest meltdown over an ICE facility in northern New Jersey.
We also shared some of the stories that we cited in our Bulldog Award citation, including a wild backstory to how she came to find herself inside the Houston-area trailer of the Islamist terrorist behind the January 1, 2025 terror attack in New Orleans.
Comedy cop weighed in again in a June 5 post:
NBC’s Jimmy Fallon returned to the subject of CBS and 60 Minutes firing Scott Pelley on Thursday by playing a satirical 60 Minutes intro that featured what he considered to be some of the replacements CBS could try to “appeal to Trump” and included Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Fallon introduced his video by claimimg, “Well, the big story this week is that CBS fired Scott Pelley after he clashed with his new boss at 60 Minutes. Yeah, it seems like CBS is really trying to appeal to Trump. Check out the new 60 Minutes correspondents.”
[…]On Friday, Stahl and Whitaker announced they will be staying, which should put an end to this idea that 60 Minutes is about to turn into Trump TV. As for Fallon’s fake trio of newbies, despite all the caterwauling about Bari Weiss, the people she has actually hired cannot be credibly said to have gotten their new jobs as part of a drive to “appeal to Trump.”
Christy did not prove that turning CBS News into Trump TV is not Weiss’ ultimate goal.
Houck came back to complain some more about the returning correspondents:
The mystery of whether the three remaining 60 Minutes correspondents – Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim – would remain at the CBS newsmagazine was solved Friday when they revealed in a joint memo displaying their aircraft carrier-sized egos that they would stay and attempt to work with CBS News editor-in-chief and new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton.
However, their note and a leaked draft largely embraced the strategy from now-former colleague Scott Pelley of simultaneously smearing management while demanding their respect and all of their demands for “independence and integrity” be met (so they can continue shoveling their toxic hatred toward half the country).
[…]They spoke directly about the firings of Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega by fretting they “exemplified 60 Minutes’ ethos of tough questions and honest storytelling.”
After addressing other, behind-the-camera departures, they lambasted Bilton and Weiss: “We want to express how sorry we are that these principled, fair and honest journalists were treated so shabbily, with such indecency…It’s heartbreaking.”
No profession on planet Earth loves itself more than and demands we feel sympathy for them than elite media.
They’re acting as though they were just forced to spend years in the Hanoi Hilton or embark on the Bataan Death March.
Houck did not explain why he so fervently believes Weiss and Bilton are above criticism. Instead, he closed with one more complaint: “One might say this is childish behavior, but one could also say it’s an insult to the youths.” But what about Houck’s childish whining?