What’s happening at CBS’s 60 Minutes and outside the illegal alien detention center in New Jersey is the same thing: Democrats acting out hysterically, even violently, when they don’t get their way. The only difference between the two is an obnoxious little queen named Scott Pelley.
Like the rest of CBS’s News division, 60 Minutes is under new management, and because the network previously operated as a propaganda outlet for the Democrat Party (and in many ways still does), a lot of the staff are uneasy about being told that their new bosses expect them to behave more like curious journalists and less like Jimmy Kimmel’s joke writers. Chief among them is Pelley, who over the past few days has had a public crash-out with the very obvious intent of becoming yet another one of the dying news media’s Trump “Resistance” heroes.
The New York Times reported Monday on an internal 60 Minutes meeting wherein Pelley berated his superiors in front of their colleagues, accusing one of them of “murdering” the show. In what was surely a tell that Pelley himself was the one to leak all the details to the Times, the report said the staff “applauded” Pelley after his tantrum.
And, scene! Pelley flourishes his right arm up and across his waist and takes a bow. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” The curtain closes.
He’s such an actress. No one is “murdering” 60 Minutes. It’s a network broadcast show, and like all network broadcast news shows, it’s ratings are in steep decline, even as 60 Minutes saw an increase in viewership this most recent season. By the way, the most recent season is the one overseen by the new bosses, a correlation Pelley didn’t seem to grasp, as he cited that piece of data in a huffy public statement this week, as if the growth was in spite of, rather than because of the change in leadership.
Pelley was rightfully fired and he continued to openly gripe about it, complaining that the program’s new executives actually took an interest in the show and didn’t let the entitled little divas like Pelley at the network call every shot. Outside of the media, this is what is known as “having a boss.”
To date, the most prominent example of new leadership at 60 Minutes interfering with any of the longtime correspondents’ work was when a segment on deportations to a detention center in El Salvador was held back until additional reporting was included. Bari Weiss, the executive who held the story, reportedly asked the correspondent to include an interview with White House senior aide Stephen Miller (Weiss even provided his contact information), and she objected to the segment’s use of the term “migrants,” since what it was referring to were people in the U.S. illegally. This is standard journalistic guidance. But Pelley prefers to call it “murdering” 60 Minutes.
A more chaotic and sometimes violent version of this dynamic has been playing out outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey, where leftists have tried to create a human barricade preventing ICE agents from entering and exiting. They also harangued Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill for — let’s see here — oh, failing to completely thwart federal immigration law enforcement.
When Sherrill showed up at the rioting in solidarity with the leftists, “some protesters shouted in Ms. Sherrill’s face to criticize her for not showing up earlier in the weekend,” according to The New York Times. And when she left, “her security had to clear the road of a couple people who tried to stop her S.U.V. from leaving.”
Naturally, the rioters are pretending to be upset about something other than what they’re really mad at. They say it’s about inhumane treatment of detained illegal aliens at the facility when there’s no evidence of that being the case, other than detainees trying to get out claiming so. They want to stay in the U.S. What wouldn’t they say?
No, what the rioters are mad about is that the Trump administration is enforcing immigration law at all. They would prefer their precious illegals be left alone so that Democrats can gain more power on both the local and federal level. More illegal aliens means more Democrat voters or, at minimum, more Democrat representation in Congress. It’s why they resist every single deportation. It’s why a sitting Democrat senator literally flew to El Salvador last year to reimport a self-professed illegal alien who had been deported.
Scott Pelley and the ICE detention rioters are raging because things aren’t going their way. And rather than offer constructive criticism or win with a persuasive argument, they act out. This is their strategy for winning elections. It’s their very strategy heading into this next one.
