Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Friday, June 10, 2011 4:04:34 PM
Just because people in the "mainstream media" believe themselves to be highly perceptive doesn't mean they are. (One of my favorite P. J. O'Rourke quotes is "There's no getting through to the highly perceptive", referring to the media's total inability to see Violetta Chamorra's landslide victory over pinko dictator Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua in 1990.) CBS's decision to replace the ratings-disastrous Katie Couric in the anchor chair (in her case, the word "anchor" is particularly appropriate) with Scott Pelley shows this self-infatuated blindness particularly well. The invaluable Media Research Center reviewed their archives on Scott Pelley's pronounced
left-liberal bias, and produced a damning amount of evidence (much of which I remembered myself). I am not a media watchdog, nor am I obsessed with the topic of media bias, so if I remembered Pelley's previous misdeeds, many others must have, too. So we all knew what we were getting with this switch.
Those of us who remembered that CBS still has a evening news broadcast, anyway...
It is easy, and I believe valid, to conclude that CBS has no idea why Couric, the Poisoned Apple of television news, was a ratings disaster in the anchor chair. It was not her sex that we objected to (after all, many of us love Megyn Kelly). It was the conspicuous, mendacious leftist slant to the stories she covered, and he covered. (Actually, the stories they don't cover are just as damaging and just as suspect, but I must return to this in a future post.)
Pelley will fail just as Couric failed, and for the same reason. The people are finally catching on that a statement isn't true just because a news anchor made it. In fact, that may be the first clue that a lie is being propounded.