Scott Pelley Isn’t a Serious Journalist

[SVPete]

Scott Pelley Isn’t a Serious Journalist

https://freebeacon.com/media/scott-pelley-isnt-a-serious-journalist/

In his posture against Bilton, Pelley portrayed himself as possessing the journalistic credibility his new boss lacked. This is a little like Jeffrey Epstein calling out the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit for their lack of caring about underage girls.

I make this claim based on personal experience.

Let me explain. Ten years ago I received a phone call out of the blue. It was from a genuinely distinguished journalist, Irish-American investigative reporter and filmmaker Phelim McAleer. Phelim was calling me to ask if I wanted to collaborate on a piece of documentary theater. The project was inspired by the true story of Steven Donziger and his legal fight with the oil giant Chevron.

Seven years before, Pelley had presented a laudatory profile of Donziger on 60 Minutes. ... Donziger, Pelley claimed, had exposed Chevron’s past wrongs and won an $18 billion judgment in the process. One-third of that was slated to go to Donziger and his financial backers. The rest was to go either to the downtrodden masses of Ecuador or to the restoration of its primeval landscape.

But in the following seven years another story was revealed. It turned out that Donziger had engaged in blackmail, pandering, fraud, conspiracy, and bribery. Moreover, it was shown that Chevron had reached prior agreements with the Ecuadorian government which absolved it of any responsibility for a future clean-up from the oil spills that were the subject of Donziger’s litigation.

In fact, the real story was that Chevron had tried to prevent the Ecuadorians from building a pipeline that caused most of the damage to their forests, and the government had then robbed the company of most of its investment in the country. ...

In short, everything about Donziger’s story was false. The "faceless" corporation had tried to behave honorably and had been abused. The radicals in charge of Ecuador had stolen from Chevron and then decided on policies that ruined large stretches of their own nation. Donziger was a crook, liar, and fraud.

Pelley’s reporting was botched for reasons that went beyond his gullibility. Anyone, of course, can be fooled by a skillful conman, but Pelley took things to a new level of deception. In order to make Chevron look bad, his 60 Minutes crew showed only the scarred oil pits that Chevron didn’t have control over and not the ones it did. The latter were sites it had worked diligently to repair.

Donziger’s deceptions were all eventually proven in federal court. For this reason, a federal judge arranged for his disbarment, and Donziger spent almost three years under house arrest, in jail, or in federal prison. Among the charges he was found guilty of was racketeering. ...
...
Pelley is a classic talking-head—someone who started in television and whose whole career has been forged within it. This is the world that the movie Broadcast News depicts. Someone handsome and deep-voiced appears on camera. Others do most or all of the writing and the research.
...
By contrast, Pelley’s new bosses are serious journalists. Both forged meaningful careers as writers and editors. Bari Weiss, who is Bilton’s boss and the editor in chief of CBS News, made a name for herself through her work as a writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. After leaving the Times, she started and built up the Free Press, which has two million subscribers and top writers like Sir Niall Ferguson and Nellie Bowles. Bilton also wrote for the Times, and he has been a contributor to Vanity Fair and a documentary filmmaker for HBO. They are genuine writer-editors.

[Ralph Wiggum]

That's a very well-written analysis. I swear, that "journalists" only create their product to impress other "journalists". Hence the low ratings in comparison to 30+ years ago of the Nightly News, Sunday Morning News Shows, and 60 Minutes.

Their time is up, because the general public is a hell of a lot smarter (and always has been) and we have FAR more options for "journalism".