Scott Pelley Blames Everyone But CBS For Its Tanked Credibility

CBS News’ Scott Pelley wants Americans to believe that corporate media correspondents like himself are the victims of a widespread effort by corporations and the Trump administration to subdue their reporting and deter future guests. On the contrary, Pelley’s show 60 Minutes has spent the last 20 years using the cushion created by a corrupt network of corporate media outlets to boost Democrats’ preferred political allies and target their political enemies.

“We are all experiencing trouble getting people to appear on our broadcast because of the fear that has spread across the country,” Pelley said in his speech at the Walter Cronkite Awards over the weekend. “And yet, given that limitation, we are still on the air telling the public these stories, no matter how difficult it is for us to do the job in the way that we would like do it.”

Pelley’s show, one of the longest-running news programs in U.S. history, isn’t struggling to find guests because of “fear.” It is 60 Minutes’ egregious track record of deceptive editing, cutting off guests, and poor framing that’s deterring people from the program.

This isn’t the first time a 60 Minutes shill claimed to be the victim; in fact, it’s not even the first time Pelley tried to fearmonger an audience about the alleged threats posed to the show by the Trump administration.

In April, 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens resigned, “citing encroachments on his journalistic independence.” Shortly after, in May 2025, CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon also left the company.

McMahon kept the reasons for her departure vague, claiming, “I do not agree on the path forward.” CNN’s Brian Stelter signaled, without objection from McMahon or CBS, that her exit had something to do with “President Trump’s intensifying political pressure against the news operation.”

That “pressure,” of course, referred to Trump’s lawsuit against CBS, which quickly turned into a Federal Communications Commission investigation and eight-figure settlement over 60 Minutes’ deceptively edited preelection interview with Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

In what Trump dubbed the “biggest scandal in broadcast history,” CBS swapped Harris’ word salad reply to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu with a quote the outlet deemed more digestible. As Federalist Assignment Editor Elle Purnell noted, the original answer went “conspicuously missing from the transcript that CBS released,” and the network repeatedly declined to “release an unedited transcript,” prompting concerns that Harris was allowed redos.

CBS’s bungled attempt to sell Americans a disfigured picture of Harris is no one-off. As The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway documented, the most popular CBS news program has a two-decade-long history of flawed and partisan reporting that only occasionally led to the exit of once-hailed correspondents such as Dan Rather and Lara Logan, whose 2013 reporting on Benghazi was eventually removed from CBS’s list of transcripts.

The network’s “most high-profile journalistic failure since Rathergate,” however, Hemingway claimed, was less about one reporter’s failure and more about 60 Minutes’ cozy editorial relationship with a “dubious and manipulative ex-CIA agent” who tried to “shape their coverage of the Benghazi attack, even though he was concurrently currying favor with Hillary Clinton for personal profit.”

Once Trump took office in 2016, CBS’s malfeasance not only worsened, but became more blatant. 60 Minutes proudly used its prominence in the corporate media world to fearmonger, sink Trump nominees, and toss corruption-embroiled officials such as former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, President Joe Biden, and Attorney General Merrick Garland softball questions. The show also issued bogus reports designed to fuel the campaign to impeach Trump, published propaganda about concerned parents and the DOJ, and lied about swaths of Russia collusion hoax and Biden family corruption reporting being “unverified.” 60 Minutes then invited architects of hoaxes on to spew more falsehoods, invented scandals and smears of effective Republican politicans such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and deceptively edited interviews to make Democrats’ political enemies — including Trump and his picks, such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — look bad.

This propaganda problem is not isolated to 60 Minutes. Rather, it has infected the entire CBS network and new Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss.

Weiss was pitched to the public as CBS’s key to “building the most trusted news organisation of the 21st Century.” Her short tenure, however, has yielded fruit of the contrary kind.

In her recent town hall with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, Weiss ambushed the new Turning Point USA leader with an appearance from the leftist Utah Valley student who was the last person to speak to Charlie before he was assassinated. While Hunter Kozak claimed he was “horrified by the people in my so-called camp who were cheering about Charlie’s murder,” he demanded Erika “condemn the violent rhetoric of Donald Trump,” which he dubbed “even worse.”

Jordan Boyd is an award-winning staff writer at The Federalist and producer of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.