Scott Pelley digs a deeper hole

It’s been a bad year for CBS’s flagship news program, 60 Minutes, from the disastrous interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris, through overt bias on the Israel-Gaza conflict and an ongoing legal war with President Trump, to the point where the show’s executive producer and the overall head of CBS News have both departed the network in recent weeks. But rather than cauterize the wound, let the season end, and try to recover and reset, lead correspondent Scott Pelley’s recent commencement address at Wake Forest University only doubled down on everything wrong with the program’s obvious bias.

In a partisan tirade more appropriate to late-night MSNBC than a university’s graduation ceremony, Pelley started his remarks to the graduates and their families with a striking warning: “[I]n this moment—this moment, this morning—our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes and into our private thoughts.” The unstated but undeniable source of those attacks, the one Pelley warns students against, is President Donald Trump.

That implication becomes unavoidable later in the speech when Pelley critiques those who would “sue the journalists” and “move to destroy law firms that stand up for the rights of others.” Further, he warns, “Today, great universities are threatened with ruin.” Again, the obvious subtext is Trump, who has sued CBS for election interference and ABC for defamation—who has issued executive orders that certain law firms should no longer be hired by the government—and who has stopped taxpayer subsidies to universities that fail to protect Jewish students from dangerous harassment.

Of course, universities are under attack and threatened with ruin—from terror-sympathizing student radicals and their sponsors who are disrupting the education of their classmates. The rule of law is under attack—from federal district court judges issuing overbroad injunctions without a solid basis in law. Freedom of speech is under attack—from the DEI speech police, such that a student cannot wear a t-shirt to school that says, “There are only two genders.”

Similarly, another way to conceive of “under attack” is “finally held accountable.” Universities are finally being held accountable for permitting vicious antisemitic attacks on their students. Law firms are finally being held accountable for engaging in illegal racial discrimination in hiring. Journalists are finally being held accountable for abusing the public airwaves to push their private political agenda.

Fundamentally, though, the flaw running throughout Pelley’s speech is its marked departure from the unbiased rectitude that should characterize journalism. Pelley is not a member of an editorial board charged with having opinions—he purports to be a correspondent, a line reporter who brings just the facts.

If Pelley wants to know why “more Americans trust gas station sushi than the legacy national media,” in the memorable X.com phrasing of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, it’s precisely because of speeches like this, where a supposedly unbiased journalist takes a clear and unrepentant side in controversies on which he is also supposedly a neutral reporter.

I have been among those leading the call for real reform within CBS News. In my view, broadcasters owe an obligation to the public to provide fair and unbiased news coverage. As the FCC has said before, “[n]o discussion of the issues involved in any controversy can be fair or in the public interest where such discussion must take place in a climate of false and misleading information concerning the basic facts of the controversy.” Yet that’s precisely what we’ve been getting from CBS News and other broadcasters, where false and misleading information concerning our great national debates are the order of the day all too often.

Pelley’s decision to hijack a university’s commencement address as a platform to grind his axe against President Trump was not only unfair to the graduates—it shows once again that at his core he is biased against Trump. And that kind of consistent, persistent bias by broadcasters is why a majority of the American people no longer trust them.