The MRC Pounds On Pelley

The Media Research Center has long had it in for Scott Pelley. When CBS officially named Pelley as Katie Couric’s replacement on the CBS Evening News in 2011, Geoffrey Dickens NewsBusters declared that “A review of the MRC’s archive reveals Pelley will most likely continue the long tradition of liberal bias advanced by his anchor predecessors Couric, Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite.”

The MRC’s “Profile of Bias” of Pelley, however, could only come up with a dozen examples of “liberal bias” it deemed worth mentioning over nearly two decades of Pelley’s work for CBS — that’s less than one example per year — and several of those were stretching things.

For instance, the MRC baselessly treats Pelley’s statement that “There were many people in this country who felt that the Supreme Court stole that election for President Bush” as Pelley’s personal belief about the case.

Similarly, the MRC portrays Pelley’s reporting on how President Clinton was, in the words of then-CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather, “singing his own praises” on the state of the economy as Pelley’s own views. The MRC claims that Pelley wants to “Carve Bill Clinton into Mt. Rushmore” even though Pelley said no such thing.

The MRC also claimed that Pelley “cover[ed] up for Bill Clinton” by declining to air footage of interviews conducted with “Arkansas state troopers who alleged that a then Governor Bill Clinton used them to procure women for adulterous affairs.” In fact, given that the troopers were never able to prove those allegations when placed under deposition, that turned out to be smart journalism.

As Joe Conason and Gene Lyons wrote in their book “The Hunting of the President,” when the troopers were deposed by lawyers for Paula Jones, no two of them “appeared capable of agreeing about anything of substance in Jones v. Clinton”:

Danny Ferguson and Roger Perry disliked Hillary Clinton and had their suspicions about Bill’s friendships with several women, but knew nothing to confirm them. Ferguson claimed that Los Angeles Times reporter William Rempel had badgered them to say that Clinton had promised the trooper a job in return for silence, and that Rempel had put words in his mouth when he refused.

L.D. Brown claimed to have hustled babes for Clinton all over the United States and to have benefited from what he called “residuals” himself. But when it came to particulars, Brown had no names, places, or dates to offer — only hearsay and rumors.

Buddy Young, a Clinton federal employee, testified that L.D. Brown hated Clinton for refusing him the state crime laboratory job, and had also gotten himself fired as president of the state troopers’ association for spending its money partying with lobbyists and state legislators. Young also mentioned taht Larry Patterson was obsessed with getting in women’s “britches,” to the exclusion of all other topics. […] Patterson said Clinton had confessed several affairs to him, and claimed to have seen the governor receiving oral endearments in parked cars. Other roopers called that a physical impossibility. The video surveillance camera through which Patterson allegedly monitored those titillating scenes hardly worked at all.

Clinton’s attorney Bob Bennett grilled Patterson about Troopergate payola, about his rent-free living arrangements with Cliff Jackson and about his multistate speaking tour with Larry Nichols on The Clinton Chronicles circuit. Specifically, what did Patters, a sworn law enforcement officer, know about the president’s involvement in drug smuggling and murder?

“Mr. Bennett,” Patterson said, “at no time have I ever said that Bill Clinton’s ever involved in any murder, nor at no time have I ever said that Bill Clinton has ever used or abused drugs. . . . I have no reason to believe that.”

“Has Mr. Nichols ever said that on those trips?”

“I’ve heard him on occasion say things like that.”

“Did you ever tell him to stop it?”

“Mr. Bennett,” the trooper replied, “he’s an adult.”

Is the MRC still standing by these discredited troopers after all these years? It appears so.

A couple days later, Dickens asserted that Pelley reacted “defensively” to the MRC’s shabby list, claiming that he “seemed to deny the charge of liberal bias as he huffed: ‘CBS has been called liberal for a lot of years,’ adding, ‘It probably harkens all the way back to Edward Murrow.’”

Pelley seems to know the game the MRC is playing — that it’s the MRC’s job to portray him as liberal, no matter how thin the evidence.

In a May 2019 post, Tim Graham grumbled that Pelley didn’t talk about CBS scandals while plugging his new book:

As part of CBS kissing up to CBS, Late Show host Stephen Colbert brought on 60 Minutes correspondent (and former Evening News anchor) Scott Pelley to promote his new book Truth Worth Telling. No one was going to bring up Dan Rather, not to mention sexual harassment scandals at CBS News, from Pelley’s dismissed 60 Minutes colleagues Charlie Rose and Jeff Fager to CBS’s harasser at the top, Les Moonves. No, Pelley came on to lecture about how President Trump and foreign governments are poisoning the information well. It sounded like…collusion.

Will Graham and Brent Bozell, in plugging their new anti-media book, agree to appear on any show that might ask about, say, the scandal of Bozell hiding for years the inconvenient fact that Graham ghost-wrote his columns — let alone anywhere outside the right-wing bubble where they might face any questioning that’s less than softball or designed to tee up talking points? Doubtful. Would Graham describe that situation as “collusion”? Doubtful.

Graham, meanwhile, is still miffed that Pelley won’t play along with his narrative. Huffing that “Pelley implied the Old Media, the liberal media are the gold standard” when it comes to correcting misinformation, grousing further:

It should be said that just having experience in journalism for decades isn’t enough to make you trustworthy, as Dan Rather proved. It can also be said that at sites like NewsBusters, you have senior people who’ve been reporting on liberal bias for 30 years (ahem). Evaluating the credibility of your news media should involve engaging with media critics and their arguments, not just dismissing their criticism as “poisoning the information.”

It should also be said that “reporting on liberal bias for 30 years” also does not make one trustworthy — especially when so much of that “reporting” is in bad faith, designed not to make journalism better but to push a partisan political narrative. Graham ‘s insistence that members of the media should be “engaging with media critics and their arguments” is especially right, given that both he and Bozell have blocked or muted us on Twitter and, therefore, to more personally engage with their arguments. You can claim you’re credible if you refuse to engage with your critics, right, Tim?

And, proving that he can hold a grudge like a champion, Graham is still upset with Pelley for failing to lead his first CBS Evening News broadcast with the Anthony Weiner scandal, opting instead for a report on the war in Afghanistan. “The Washington Post showered accolades at the time, gushing Pelley had pleased the late CBS legend Edward R. Murrow,” Graham reminded us. Yes, Graham complained about it then, too.

Pelley seemedto have stuck a nerve with his Wake Forest commencement speech in 2025. 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.