Three Up, Three Down


What the fuck has happened to 60 Minutes?

Over the last few weeks, the once venerable news program has aired three stories that border on the bizarre. The first was Lara Logan's piece on Benghazi, which has already been debunked by a New York Times piece and was so embarrassing to CBS that Logan was forced to take a leave of absence. The second piece on the NSA by John Miller looked more like an infomercial than a news story. And now this latest piece by Leslie Stahl on the clean energy sector that is so misleading it could've been a feature story on Fox News.

You know I was starting to feel a little guilty about my last piece in which I ostensibly blasted the main-stream media, and then, last Sunday, 60 Minutes puts this nonsense on the air. So much for remorse. Kudos to the Daily Kos for exposing it to the light of day.

Just in case you didn't get the chance to see the Stahl piece, called "Cleantech Crash," maybe, like me, you were too busy watching the 49ers - Packers playoff game, I'll recap it for you. The government wasted billions of taxpayer dollars investing in clean energy companies that eventually went bust. One of those companies was...wait for it...Solyndra. The favorite whipping boy of the Republican Party took center stage in Stahl's piece. But, as the Daily Kos pointed out, the number of companies that failed totaled about 3 percent. Stahl simply ignored the breakthroughs in the industry.

I don't know what's going on at the offices of CBS lately, but its signature news magazine, the one that for decades has been a stalwart of broadcast journalism, appears to have taken a considerable slide into mediocrity, along with a rather obvious and definitive turn to the right.

It's one thing to be sloppy; it's quite another to be in the tank.


Links: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/06/1267627/-60-Minutes-screws-up-again-this-time-on-clean-energy#
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cleantech-crash-60-minutes/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/31/opinion/the-facts-about-benghazi.html?_r=0

Comments

Anonymous said…
Sad. Kronkite and Murrow are turning over. 60 Minutes used to be the pinnacle of investigative journalism. You should have no regrets about blasting corporate run media...people should know what's happened to the discourse in this country. What's next?
Kermit the frog telling children they shouldn't share, because they're only enabling their lazy,
want something for nothing playmates?