By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, April 12, 2021
Having lied so brazenly about the nature of
Florida’s COVID-vaccine rollout that even the state’s Democrats felt compelled
to speak up in outrage, CBS has taken a week to consider its
behavior and decided that it did nothing wrong.
Well, that must be a relief.
Acknowledging the incident at the end of last
night’s 60 Minutes, host Sharyn Alfonsi steered clear of such prosaic questions as whether
what she had said was true or false, and chose instead to deploy an
impressively pusillanimous version of the “we started a conversation” defense.
“Some viewers,” Alfonsi explained, “including a retired newsman, applauded the
story” she had told. Others, she said, “condemned it.” And then, without
further ado, ran the titles.
By taking this approach, Alfonsi tipped her hat at one of
the more annoying lines one sees trotted out when a public figure does or says
something objectionable: That if they are “taking flak, then they must be over
the target.” Sometimes, of course, this is true. Sometimes, though, it just
means you’re being an asshole. Despite its implications to the contrary, CBS
was not admonished last week because it said something controversial, it was
not admonished because it stood up to power, and it was not admonished because
it waded into the middle of a thorny partisan debate. It was admonished because
it knowingly broadcast the lie that Governor DeSantis had used Publix to help
distribute COVID-19 vaccines because of a wheel-greasing campaign donation, and
because it had deliberately omitted an interview clip in which DeSantis not
only explained why Publix played the role that it did, but made clear that
stores other than Publix got the vaccine first.
It was clear from her performance that Alfonsi is hoping
her viewers will throw up their hands in confusion and say, “Ah well, six of
one, half a dozen of the other.” But, if those viewers have any self-respect,
they will do no such thing. That CBS has refused to admit its mistake does not
suggest that there must be something to its critique so much as it suggests
that there are no incentives for it to concede error. Or, to put it more
precisely: It suggests that the incentives that led CBS to broadcast such an
obvious falsehood in the first instance remain operative.
Why did CBS go down to Florida, spend three months
searching for a scandal, and then desperately attach itself to a fable that it
would have known within hours did not check out? I’ll tell you why: because CBS
began with the premise and worked backwards from there. Like far too many of
their colleagues, Sharyn Alfonsi and her team at 60 Minutes are
convinced that something must be rotten in Florida, and that,
somehow, Governor DeSantis is getting away with it. And so, like far too many
of their colleagues in the industry, they have resolved to find the missing
treasure by hook or by crook. In style and in execution, what CBS did last week
was similar to what people who stage fake hate crimes are doing, which is
fabricating evidence in an attempt to illustrate what they believe is a
“broader truth.” Like the bad cop who slips a bag of heroin into a suspected
drug dealer’s pocket or the Soviet commissar who makes an example of a random
kulak, CBS was determined to fire its slings and arrows and would not be
deterred by anything so banal as a lack of proof.
When explaining their role within our society,
journalists like to portray themselves as grizzled sticklers, with ink-stained
fingers and a hard-won thousand-yard stare. “If your mother says she loves
you,” such figures like to say, “check it out.” This is good advice. It’s also
advice that is mostly ignored. Forget how far the network has retreated for a
moment and consider that the 60 Minutes story Alfonsi is
defending was an obvious disaster when it aired. This was not a
segment that fell apart over time; it was a segment that never had any form. It
was, from the beginning, a fraudulently constructed insinuation that relied for
its kick upon the selective editing of a publicly available video and the
willful rejection of testimony from the only witnesses that were available. It
was, as Governor DeSantis colorfully put it at a press conference last week, a
“crock.” As time has passed, and as the scale of the deception has become
clear, it has only got worse. Now, the story is that a retired newsman liked
it, but others didn’t, and hey, whatayagonnado?
The ugly truth here is that CBS feels no need to
apologize or self-correct because CBS knows that it has the mob on its side. It
gets awfully tiring saying “imagine if,” but we can all safely assume that if
this corruption had been aimed at a politician or a cause that the American
media liked, they would not have reported on the transgression as if
the only thing that mattered was that Republicans had “pounced” on it. Critics
who hope to see some resignations at CBS had better hope that someone involved
in the production said something rude on the Internet in 1997, because, if they
didn’t, there is no chance whatsoever of repercussions. The story has the right
cast and the wrong victim — and that’s all there is to it.
Buried deep within a recent New York Times report
about a false accusation of racism at Massachusetts’s Smith College is one of
the most pithily fashioned examples of the way the media treat inconvenient
facts that I have ever seen. “The story,” the paper explains, “highlights the tensions between a
student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with
it.” Or, as we say here in realityland: The story is about a student who lied.
Last week, CBS lied, too. If she wishes, Sharyn Alfonsi can smirk her way
through every letter she receives between now and kingdom come. If she wishes,
she can recruit every “retired newsman” in the country to her side. But it
won’t change what she did — not by an iota.
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