OPINION:
CBS should be required, under federal campaign-finance laws, to report the Oct. 30 edition of “60 Minutes” to the Federal Election Commission in what amounted to an in-kind campaign contribution to the Democratic Party ahead of this week’s midterm elections.
The long-running newsmagazine program, once the crown jewel of TV journalism, apparently has devolved into just another liberal media shill for Democrats, as evidenced by last week’s 13-minute segment on Republican “MAGA election deniers.”
By CBS News’ count, there are 308 GOP candidates who it characterizes as “election deniers” running for federal or statewide office across the country in the midterms.
“60 Minutes” and much of the rest of the mainstream media—shredding what little pretense remains of the journalistic “we report, you decide” credo—have taken to characterizing not just former President Donald Trump, but anyone who supports him and/or who insists on election integrity (which everyone should favor), as “deniers.”
Scott Pelley’s angst-filled report implied that they’re somehow a threat to democracy. It was all but indistinguishable from the unhinged campaign rhetoric coming from President Biden and his fellow Democrats, who polls say are facing a likely (and richly deserved) shellacking at the polls this week.
“You know, you have over 350 Republican candidates for everything from state auditor all the way to secretary of state to governor who are ‘election deniers,’ who say that they, in fact, do not believe the last election was fair,” Mr. Biden said Nov. 3 at a campaign appearance in New Mexico for the reelection bid of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Mr. Biden inflated the number of “deniers,” just as he has consumer prices.
“Democracy is on the ballot this year in America. Literally on the ballot, folks,” he warned, ratcheting up the overheated rhetoric.
Ms. Lujan Grisham is one of the few Democrats still willing to be seen in public with the president, whose job-approval ratings are so far underwater that he needs scuba gear. A Reuters-Ipsos poll released Nov. 1 found that just 40% of those polled approve of the job Mr. Biden is doing, while 55% disapprove.
That he’s not even further underwater suggests those 40% either must be knee-jerk “Yellow Dog” Democrats and/or totally oblivious to an inflation rate at a 40-plus-year high, high gas prices, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants streaming over our open southern border every month, soaring violent crime, and rampant homelessness, all of which Democratic policies have unleashed on the country.
As political consultant Kellyanne Conway noted Nov. 6 on “Fox News Sunday,” Democrats are “all out there saying, ‘election deniers,’ and Americans are looking at them and saying, you’re inflation deniers, you’re recession deniers, you’re rising-crime deniers, you’re education lost-learning and reduced test-score deniers.”
Mr. Pelley’s “60 Minutes” report focused almost entirely on Arizona, where the Republican candidates for governor, senator, and secretary of state were all branded as “election deniers.”
Piling on, The Washington Post claimed Nov. 3 that “an analysis of candidates’ statements and actions show a majority of the Republican nominees on the ballot this fall for federal or state offices—291 overall—have denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election,” and that “[i]n Arizona, all but one of the 13 GOP nominees have done so.”
“Democracy as we know it may not survive in Arizona. That’s not an exaggeration,” former President Barack Obama hyperventilated in a Nov. 2 campaign speech in Phoenix on behalf of Arizona’s Democratic candidates.
“That is a fact,” Mr. Obama insisted, although the self-appointed media “fact-checkers” apparently have no interest in checking that “fact.”
The slanted “60 Minutes” report failed to mention that Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has countered the trumped-up (no pun intended) “election denier” narrative head-on, firing back with Mr. Trump’s “fake news” epithet and offering journalists a long list of Democrats who “denied” the outcomes of 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections and the 2018 gubernatorial vote in Georgia.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee has compiled a video of dozens of those same Democrats insisting the three presidential elections won by Republicans were “stolen” and/or were “illegitimate.” The video mashup includes so many clips that it runs a full 12 minutes.
“It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it is un-American,” Mr. Biden said of “election denialism” at a separate Nov. 2 speech at Washington’s Union Station. “As I’ve said before, you can’t love your country only when you win.”
The president might want to tell that to those members of his own party who were “election deniers” long before the 45th president-to-be came down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 and since.
In fact, Hillary Clinton—who has bitterly complained, more or less continuously since losing the 2016 election to Mr. Trump, that he was “an illegitimate president”—has now taken “election denialism” to the next level.
On Oct. 21, the far-left group Indivisible released a video of Mrs. Clinton claiming that “right-wing extremists” are already plotting to steal the 2024 presidential election.
“I know we’re all focused on the 2022 midterm elections, and they are incredibly important,” Mrs. Clinton said. “But we also have to look ahead because … our opponents certainly are. Right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election, and they’re not making a secret of it.”
Yet, so far we know, no one in the liberal media has used their favorite catchphrase in these matters—“without evidence”—to call out Hillary “Nostradamus” Clinton’s baseless claim.
Likewise, none of the above found its way into Mr. Pelley’s report on “60 Minutes.”
The irony in all of this is that Democrats, too clever by half, spent what Newsweek estimated at $44 million on ads in GOP primary races across six states to help get what they considered “election denier” and “extremist” candidates nominated. That could now come back to bite them Tuesday night, and it would serve them right.
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