More drama at 60 minutes
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You can see some big money pro-israel tribalism at play in the installment of Weiss at CBS. But that's culturally "trumpy" only by coincidence. And you can see a rejection of standard mainstream left progressivism. But that's the marketplace. Heterodox cultural views against Obama and Biden and Kamala era mainstream progressivism has been around long before Trump and will be around long after he's gone. The cultural shit show created by those progressives creates real issues that real people react to honestly. They don't need a demagogue to lead them by the nose into outrage.
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Word on the street is that 60 minutes had historically been providing left-biased journalism. What is the evidence for this?
ChatGPT:
There is some evidence that 60 Minutes has leaned left in recent political coverage, but it is not as clean as “historically left-biased” in the simple partisan sense. The better claim is:On culture-war and Trump-era political stories, 60 Minutes has often looked establishment-liberal / anti-Trump / institutionally Democratic in topic selection, framing, and editing choices. But it has also run stories damaging to Democrats or liberal institutions, so the evidence is uneven rather than dispositive.
The main evidence buckets:
1. Third-party bias ratings put 60 Minutes left of center
Ad Fontes rates CBS: 60 Minutes at Bias: -9.79, where negative means left and positive means right, with reliability 34.96. That is not “far left”; it is more like skewed left but still in mainstream news/analysis territory. Ad Fontes says it uses panels with left-, right-, and center-leaning analysts to review sample content. (Ad Fontes Media)
AllSides rates CBS News Online as Lean Left and reports that CBS’s audience is disproportionately left-of-center: about 39% left/left-of-center and 20% right/right-of-center, compared with 38% right/right-of-center in the general survey baseline. That is not 60 Minutes specifically, but it supports the broader CBS News environment critique. (AllSides)
2. The DeSantis / Publix vaccine segment is one of the strongest examples
In 2021, 60 Minutes ran a segment implying a possible pay-for-play relationship between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Publix over vaccine distribution. The criticism was that the show aired a compressed exchange and omitted context that made DeSantis’s answer look less responsive and more damning than the longer answer did.
The Florida governor’s office called the segment “false, defamatory and partisan,” accusing 60 Minutes of misrepresenting the vaccine rollout. (Florida Governor's Office) The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, not exactly a MAGA house organ, criticized the segment under the headline “60 Minutes embraces innuendo in Ron DeSantis story,” focusing on the editing and the insinuation. (The Washington Post)
That is probably the best concrete example of editing/framing that plausibly harmed a Republican politician through insinuation more than proof.
3. The Kamala Harris interview editing controversy gave critics a very concrete artifact
Trump sued CBS/Paramount over the editing of the 2024 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Paramount later settled for $16 million, and as part of the resolution CBS agreed that 60 Minutes would release transcripts of future presidential-candidate interviews, subject to limited redactions. (PBS)
That does not prove CBS legally admitted deceptive editing. In fact, AP notes that 60 Minutes released the full unedited transcript in February 2025, and the settlement did not mean CBS admitted wrongdoing. (The Associated Press) But politically, the episode gave the right a simple, quantifiable accusation: the edited version seemed more favorable to Harris than the rawer answer critics thought viewers should have seen.
For “evidence of left bias,” this is less strong than the DeSantis example if you mean “proven journalistic misconduct,” but it is strong if you mean “why many people think the show protects Democrats from looking bad.”
4. The Hunter Biden laptop exchange aged badly
In Trump’s 2020 60 Minutes interview, Lesley Stahl pushed back on Trump’s Hunter Biden laptop claims as not verified at the time. Later, CBS itself reported in 2022 that a forensic review found data on a copy of the laptop appeared authentic and had no clear evidence of fabrication. (CBS News)
This is a classic example of what conservatives call liberal media bias by premature dismissal: treating a politically damaging Democratic scandal as too dubious to discuss, while treating less-certain allegations against Republicans as more newsworthy. To be fair, in October 2020 there really were provenance and disinformation concerns. But the asymmetry critique is not crazy.
5. Conservative media-watchdog studies argue the pattern is broader
The Media Research Center and Daily Signal have repeatedly argued that 60 Minutes favors liberal narratives and omits inconvenient facts. The Daily Signal’s 2025 critique specifically accused the show of “bias by omission” and framed the Harris editing controversy and other segments as evidence of liberal slant. (
Link to video)I would treat MRC/Daily Signal as advocacy evidence, not neutral measurement. They are explicitly conservative institutions. But they are useful for identifying the bill of particulars: selective editing, story choice, hostile Republican interviews, softer Democratic treatment, and omission of facts that complicate liberal narratives.
6. But “historically left-biased” is complicated by counterexamples
The strongest counterexample is the 2013 Benghazi debacle. 60 Minutes aired a damaging story about the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi that later collapsed because a key source was unreliable. CBS apologized and faced calls for investigation. (The Guardian)
That was not left-biased; if anything, it helped a Republican line of attack against Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. So a blanket claim that 60 Minutes has always simply functioned as Democratic propaganda is too crude.
My read
The evidence supports this narrower claim:
In the Trump/DeSantis/Biden-Harris era, 60 Minutes has shown a measurable and observable left-of-center institutional bias, especially in framing, editing, story selection, and skepticism asymmetry.
The evidence does not fully support this stronger claim:
“60 Minutes has always been straightforwardly left-wing journalism.”
The strongest hard evidence is the Ad Fontes left-of-center rating, the DeSantis/Pulbix edit/framing controversy, the Harris interview editing settlement/transcript policy, and the Hunter Biden laptop skepticism that later looked overconfident. The best rebuttal is that 60 Minutes has also produced major stories damaging to Democrats and liberal institutions, sometimes disastrously so, as with Benghazi.
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There will probably never be any objective proof that the journalistic integrity changed. That discussion will always be dominated by non-disprovable tribal rhetoric from each side, who will claim the journalistic high ground. And if the ratings nosedive, that won't be much proof of anything either. But it seems obvious that the goals of the new leadership are to increase ratings. Pelley is hysterical, to the extent he even believes what he says. Or he's calculated and playing into the anti-Trump sentiment to jumpstart his substack. It's fun to be self-righteous, that much is true. And his actions were obviously intended to maximize the performative self-righteousness, and viral potential. To call it a sacrifice seems very generous.
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We'll find out in a year or so. If the show continues in more or less the same format, ratings, content... Pelley was a fool. If the show is no-more or objectively changed its journalistic reputation, then we'll know Pelley was right. Can you please ask Siri to remind you in a year to see if you or 89th were right?
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The only objective thing will be the ratings. If you believe "reputation" is objectively measurable, then I'd be curious what 60 minutes' objective reputation is at this moment, and why you will find so many people who disagree that that is the objective reputation.
Education is extremely important.
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The only objective thing will be the ratings. If you believe "reputation" is objectively measurable, then I'd be curious what 60 minutes' objective reputation is at this moment, and why you will find so many people who disagree that that is the objective reputation.
The only objective thing will be the ratings. If you believe "reputation" is objectively measurable, then I'd be curious what 60 minutes' objective reputation is at this moment, and why you will find so many people who disagree that that is the objective reputation.
This is the only place I'm aware of that does regular bias and accuracy measurements for almost every program you've heard of.
Reliability = Higher is better.
Bias = 0 is neutral, negative number is liberal, positive number is conservative.Current scores:
60 Minutes
Reliability: +35
Bias: -9
https://adfontesmedia.com/60-minutes-bias-and-reliability/FOx News
Reliability: +28
Biast: +18
Source: https://adfontesmedia.com/fox-news-primetime-bias-and-reliability/
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Not to mention that the "Trumpism" so hated by everybody has little relation to directionally right politics. Unless you take the accusations of fascism seriously. Corruption, lying, authoritarianism, all the usual complaints, have little to nothing to do with the right/left dichotomy.
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Not to mention that the "Trumpism" so hated by everybody has little relation to directionally right politics. Unless you take the accusations of fascism seriously. Corruption, lying, authoritarianism, all the usual complaints, have little to nothing to do with the right/left dichotomy.
Unless you take the accusations of fascism seriously.
I can’t take the fascist accusation seriously, however there is a decidedly faint odour of Bonapartism wafting about Washington as of late. I suspect the stench will become stronger once the midterms are past and “His Exalted Loathsomeness” officially becomes a lame duck.
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I relented and listened to Mr Pelley speak his side of the story. A couple highlights from the first 5 minutes:
- He's totally shocked to have been fired. So he's either lying or profoundly stupid. I guess the former.
- 60 Minutes online version received 2.3 billion views last year. Mr Pelley notes that that's one third of humanity. Because Mr Pelley lacks even basic critical thinking skills.
I'm not sure I can bear any more of this guy's elite brilliance, he's really dazzling me.
Link to video -
Difficult to listen to this sobby sanctimonious septegenarian. The "war correspondent" thing is clearly fundamental to his identity, and he expects that card to earn him unconditional credibility and respect. He is old in every possible way one can be old. But I'm sure his message is heard loud and clear by the next generation of journalists, approximately 100% of whom would crawl over one another to get a spot as a "war correspondent" for a prominent publication. But it's a sign of unique courage, too. Just ask all of them.
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The last American journalist for a prominent publication to have been killed in the line of duty was over 20 years ago in the Iraq war. Not sure how that level of statistical danger compares to the danger endured by those who commute to their jobs five days a week on the American highways.
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It would be very easy to accuse Mr Pelley of stolen valor. The reputation of war correspondents is forged by people who walk the walk to a much greater extent than he ever did, or ever might have done. They don't let the embedded Pelleys of the world face real danger when they can help it.
Your instinct is directionally right for elite American network/newspaper correspondents, but I’d separate two claims:
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“Being a war correspondent” is genuinely dangerous globally. CPJ recorded record journalist/media-worker deaths in 2024 and again in 2025, overwhelmingly driven by Gaza and other conflict zones. That danger is now borne mostly by local journalists, not famous American network correspondents parachuting in. (Reuters)
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For prominent U.S.-outlet American correspondents, the statistical death risk has recently been very low. As we said, the last clean “major U.S. publication + American + killed covering war” case seems to be Michael Kelly of The Atlantic / Washington Post, killed near Baghdad on April 3, 2003. CPJ’s Iraq retrospective says only two U.S. journalists died in the Iraq war, and Kelly was the major-publication battlefield case. (Committee to Protect Journalists)
On the highway comparison: U.S. traffic deaths are not trivial. NHTSA’s 2024 figure was about 39,254 traffic deaths, with a fatality rate of 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. (NHTSA) So a commuter driving, say, 15,000 miles/year faces a crude annual road-death exposure around:
15,000 × 1.19 / 100,000,000 = 0.0001785, or about 1 in 5,600 per year.
That’s not perfectly apples-to-apples, because the denominator for “prominent U.S. war correspondents deployed to war zones” is tiny and intermittent. But your rhetorical point is fair: for a famous American correspondent in the modern era, “war correspondent” may function more as a credibility/status credential than as evidence of ongoing extraordinary mortal risk. The people paying the real current death toll are much more often local reporters in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Mexico, etc., not the Scott Pelley class.
One caveat: danger is not just death. War reporters can face kidnapping, detention, injury, trauma, and arbitrary violence. But if we’re talking fatality statistics for prominent American outlet journalists, the “I risked my life in war zones” credential is probably doing more emotional work than actuarial work.
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