Scott Pelleys abrupt dismissal from 60 Minutes and CBS News has prompted an entirely predictable reaction from the left: MSNOW star Rachel Maddow is already campaigning to bring him into her ideological fold.
According to Gateway Pundit, Maddow used her primetime platform to cast Pelley not as a high-profile journalist who lost his job at a legacy network, but as a kind of martyr in a supposed war on the press. MS NOW host Rachel Maddow suggested former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley join her network after he was fired from CBS News on Tuesday. For viewers who have long suspected that Pelleys reporting leaned left, Maddows invitation simply confirms that he was always a better fit for a progressive cable outlet than for a supposedly neutral broadcast news program.
Maddow framed the issue in starkly partisan terms, portraying critics of the establishment media as enemies of constitutional freedoms rather than as citizens demanding basic fairness and balance. Theres nobody who is more acutely attuned to the value of a free press than those who are trying to take it away, Maddow said on an MS NOW panel. She went further, invoking President Donald Trump directly and casting his criticism of biased coverage as an authoritarian threat: And when the president baldly says, I am going to use the power of the state in order to get the media that I want, and he lines up oligarchic friends in order to do that for him. Again, theres no pretense. Theres no saying this is for any other reason.
Maddow then turned to CBS itself, insisting there was no hidden motive behind Pelleys ouster beyond what left-leaning journalists claim to see as political pressure. She added, Theres nothing else going on at CBS News other than what we can see is happening at CBS News. And I dont know where Scott Pelley will land. Frankly, I hope he lands right here. In other words, a network that has spent years branding itself as a bastion of resistance journalism is openly recruiting a high-profile CBS figure whose work conservatives have long viewed as slanted.
Her comments culminated in a call to arms that defined journalism as the domain of those who share her worldview, implicitly excluding conservative media and their audiences. I hope hes on TV tomorrow. And I hope that everybody in journalism and everybody who values a free press figures out ways to outmaneuver the people who are trying to take the free press from us. But it is a fully joined fight at this point. And theres no, I just dont think theres any pretense that anything else was happening here, Maddow said. When she speaks of people who are trying to take the free press from us, the obvious question is who exactly us isbecause to many on the right, it sounds like she is referring to a closed club of liberal media elites who believe they alone are entitled to define the narrative.
The outrage over Pelleys firing has come almost exclusively from Democrats and liberal media figures, which tells its own story about where his sympathies have long rested. For conservatives who have watched the corporate press operate as an unofficial arm of the left, Maddows eagerness to bring Pelley to MSNOW simply strips away the last pretense of neutrality and underscores a deeper truth: these activists in anchor chairs do not see the press as a public trust, but as their own propertyand they react with fury whenever that control is even slightly diminished.
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