The Media Research Center loves beating up on “60 Minutes” for the purported offense of not being right-wing enough. But Curtis Houck touted some new right-wing leanings on the show that he hoped would continue in an April 7 post:
While it’s certain to not always be the case, Sunday’s 60 Minutes offered a possible harbinger of things to come if editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is to turn CBS News into a network with journalism that appeals to all Americans. The episode including a lengthy piece blasting California’s high-speed rail boondoggle and then a closing minute from Christian evangelist Franklin Graham about Easter.
Correspondent John Wertheim laid bare the ugly reality of how America went from having trains as a central part of the country’s history to an afterthought as a jumping off point to an attempt by California for a bullet train “connecting L.A. and San Francisco has lurched, derailed, cost billions and may never happen.”
[…]Shifting to the end of the show, CBS’s other supposed sin was giving Graham — the son of the late American preacher Billy Graham — a few minutes to talk about the connection between Christianity and America[.] […]
Check out the vile, unhinged replies and quoted replies seething over an X post of Graham’s simple message about how Americans have turned to churches for education, health care, relief after disaster, and even a search for our meaning.
Houck didn’t mention that there’s a reason Graham might draw such emnity: He’s a partisan right-winger who uncritically backs Donald Trump.
Alas, Houck’s wishful partisan thinking didn’t come to pass. We’ve already noted how the MRC’s Tim Graham lashed out at “60 Minutes” for having on Catholic cardinals who didn’t back Trump’s actions regarding ICE and Iran, whining further about this in a later column. Graham whined further about the show in an April 27 post:
It’s mind-boggling how the press pretends that hostilities between President Trump and the press is a one-way street. They somehow never qualify as hostile. Axios.com mourned the end of a “truce” after the shooting attempt at the Correspondents Dinner.
Zachary Basu began: “One uncomfortable question was all it took for President Trump to resume hostilities with the Washington press, less than 24 hours after their shared brush with death.” CBS 60 Minutes interviewer Norah O’Donnell repeated the shooter’s claims that the president was a rapist, pedophile, and traitor. How is that question not “resuming hostilities”?
In liberal brains, hostile questions are just “accountability” questions. In his reliably liberal newsletter, Brian Stelter put it this way: “The president wants attention but he resists accountability. The press is going to keep up the accountability, so the relationship is going to remain tense, and that’s OK….O’Donnell did her job and asked hard questions.” Trump called her a “disgrace.”
Graham offered no evidence that Trump was not a rapist or a pedophile; rather, he sought to shut down the debate by playing whataboutism: “Liberals like Brian Stelter don’t acknowledge that “accountability” is not what 60 Minutes has done for Democrats. Let’s just talk about the many Steve Kroft softball interviews with Barack Obama.”
Graham ranted about this again on his May 1 podcast:
Then Trump granted an interview to Norah O’Donnell on 60 Minutes, where she dared to read the manifesto of the crazy man who wanted to kill Trump, where he called the president a rapist, a pedophile, and a traitor. Axios said Trump broke the “truce” with the press by objecting to the questioner as “disgusting,” when that obnoxious question broke any truce that was in place.
Again, Graham made no apparent effort to disprove the accusations.