Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon broke his silence since leaving the Trump administration in a wide-ranging interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes that aired over the weekend. Political analysts have picked apart the conversation topic-by-topic, word-by-word in an attempt to discern the state of the White House, which advisors presently hold the most influence over President Trump, and what sort of relationship Bannon will have with the administration from his perch atop Breitbart News.
Despite ubiquitous commentary, not a single “fact-checker” from Snopes, Politifact, or The Washington Post noticed the stunning lie Bannon propagated during the interview. After Charlie Rose asserted, “We’re all immigrants except the Native Americans who were here,” Steve Bannon responded, “Don’t — don’t give me — this is the thing of the leftists. Charlie, that’s beneath you.” In fact, even a cursory familiarity with CBS News or its journalists demonstrates that nothing whatsoever is beneath them.
Rose’s boilerplate leftism pervades the interview, but in just that single exchange he asserted, “America is in the eyes of so many people, and it’s what people respect America for, it is, people have been able to come here, find a place, contribute to the economy. That’s what has been in America, and you seem to want to turn it around and stop it.” One cannot be sure whether these dubious premises are pure sophistry — e.g., “in the eyes of so many people,” “it’s what people respect America for” — or if they’re born of genuine historical ignorance regarding exclusionary immigration laws through 1965, immigration patterns over the centuries, and the varied economic contributions of different immigrant groups. Either way, Rose’s interview prowess recalls that of his 60 Minutes colleague Leslie Stahl, whom Antonin Scalia once reduced to incoherent babbling during a conversation about torture.
Worse than CBS News’s incompetence and ignorance, however, is its outright deception, as when less than two months before the 2004 election, Evening News anchor Dan Rather aired a segment to five-and-a-half million people in which he used forged documents to smear President George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard. Rather, never one to shy away from a fact-free partisan fight, doubled down on the claims and insisted that experts retained by CBS News had authenticated the documents. Six months after the incident, network executives finally forced Rather to resign in disgrace.
More recently, CBS has added repulsive insinuation to its repertoire of ineptitude and partisan deception. In his penultimate broadcast from the Evening News desk, anchor Scott Pelley asked whether the attempted assassination in June of Steve Scalise was “self-inflicted.” One imagines only strict time limitations prevented Pelley from further observing that Congressman Scalise had indeed been walking around late at night and wearing an awfully short skirt.
Since at least the days of Walter Cronkite’s unilateral and disastrous concession of the Vietnam War, CBS News has blazed a trail for the corrupt and partisan mainstream media apparatus more accurately called “fake news” than journalism. We therefore rate Bannon’s claim that CBS News has any dignity whatsoever “pants on fire.”