Scott Pelley, Donald Trump and the sound of the truth — or endless lies.
As you may have heard or seen, Donald Trump stormed out of his “Meet the Press” interview this past weekend after anchor Kristen Welker pressed him on his insistence that a California election and the 2020 presidential election were “rigged.” She also countered his lie-filled version of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, in which he claimed that FBI agents ushered the rioters into the Capitol.
Where’s the evidence? she wanted to know. Why have you never presented any evidence for these claims? And why has no court of law ever ruled that there was such evidence?
Trump — who talked over her boorishly for much of the interview — had no actual answer for these reasonable questions, so he resorted to insult and then abruptly walked out.
“You’re crooked….You’re either crooked or stupid…” He reeled off a list of networks from ABC to CNN, and proclaimed they all knew about rigged elections.
“One-sided crooked networks…Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time,” he said, and walked off camera.
It was a shameful performance, and in some cases, the news media paid it little mind. The New York Times, for instance, gave the abrupt departure a single line in the eighth paragraph of its story about the interview: “Mr. Trump eventually ended the wide-ranging interview after being repeatedly pressed by Ms. Welker about claiming, without evidence, that recent elections in California were rigged.” To its credit, the Times story did clearly state that Trump was wrong when he claimed in the NBC interview that he hadn’t promised he wouldn’t involve the U.S. in any wars. As the story stated without attribution: “He did promise,” and quoted him, “They said, ‘He will start a war…I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.’”
The Washington Post, by contrast, gave prominent display to an article all about Trump’s temper tantrum, headlined “Trump walks out of ‘Meet the Press’ interview when challenged over false claims.” The story (gift link here) noted with a certain amount of understatement: “Trump appeared to become agitated when Welker asked him about the $1.8 billion fund he has sought to pay people claiming they were victims of politicized prosecutions.”
Welker herself downplayed the conflict in her odd tweet: “My interview with President Trump on Friday afternoon was unfortunately complicated by weather issues. In spite of those challenges, we still had a substantial conversation…”
Jake Tapper of CNN rightly described Trump’s behavior as “some wild, unhinged stuff.”
Good for Welker for being persistent. There should be more of this.
I can’t really recommend that you watch this interview because it’s so disturbing to see and hear. Nothing new, really, but it’s awful nonetheless to see the president of the United States becoming so abusive and pushing lie after lie.
By contrast, consider the illuminating New York Times interview with Scott Pelley of Sixty Minutes, who was fired by his longtime employer, CBS News, last week. Here’s some of what he told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who asked the right questions and gave the thoughtful and eloquent Pelley his head:
“There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at “60 Minutes” before, or at CBS News before,” he said. “We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”
This one I do encourage you to watch (here’s a gift link) because it is a display of intelligence and righteous indignation about what’s going on at CBS News under its contemptible new ownership and management.
There are parts of it that are mind-blowing in their honesty and emotion, and highly informative about what was really happening at the network and the show. Listen to Pelley particularly about Tanya Simon, the executive producer, who was another victim of Bari Weiss’s purge.
A veteran TV executive with whom I keep in touch urged people not to simply read the transcript. I agree! It’s long, but you’ll benefit by seeing even some portion of it.
All of this, of course, is related to Trump — who even in his dotage and decline has such a forcefield around him. (As I write this, he was due within hours to disrupt New York City by attending a Knicks playoff game at Madison Square Garden — another display of his boundless narcissism and desire to draw attention to himself.)
CBS News’s murder, as Pelley puts it, would not be happening without billionaires like CEO David Ellison cozying up to Trump in order to get federal approval for pending mergers. And Trump’s lies — and the media normalization of them — continue apace.
Readers, I’d love to hear your views of the “Meet the Press” interview and of Welker’s efforts to press for evidence. I’d also love to hear your reaction to what Scott Pelley said — and how he said it. Please let me know your reaction in the comments.
Separately, I’ve also been paying close attention to the reporting about Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, a populist Democrat and Iraq War veteran, and to the media coverage of Platner’s background.
If you’ve been following it, too, how newsworthy do you find the stories about his “unsettling” or “toxic” relationships with women? If I were still the public editor of the Times, I’m sure this would be on my radar this week, since that story has been sharply criticized by its major source — a Republican woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who has worked for the Heritage Foundation and who depicted the man she dated as physically volatile — as well as by people who insist the story is a “nothing burger,” a Republican smear campaign. It drew fire across the political spectrum for various reasons.
Maine’s primary election is today. Platner is likely to win; the bigger question is how he’ll fare against Republican Susan Collins in November’s general election. Here’s a good catch-up on the story in the Guardian. How do you feel about Democrats like California Congressman Ro Khanna who continues to support Platner despite what he calls the candidate’s “shameful” behavior?
I’ll probably return to this after the primary, assuming Platner wins. Maine public media notes that the controversies don’t seem to have seriously hurt his popularity in the state.
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My background: I am a Lackawanna, NY native who started my career as a summer intern at the Buffalo News, my hometown daily. After years as a reporter and editor, I was named the paper’s first woman editor in chief in 1999, and ran the 200-person newsroom for almost 13 years. Starting in 2012, I served as the first woman “public editor” of the New York Times — an internal media critic and reader representative — and later was the media columnist for the Washington Post. These days, I write here on Substack, as well as for the Guardian US. I’ve also written two books, taught journalism ethics, and won a few awards, including three for defending First Amendment principles.
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