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I want to talk about the firing of Scott P from 60 Minutes. And I want to specifically direct what I'm about to say to those of you who don't watch 60 Minutes. Maybe you've watched it occasionally or you've seen a clip of a story on YouTube or maybe you've never watched it in any form to any degree ever. And if you are one of those people, you might be wondering, well, why should I even care about this? Why should I care about a correspondent being fired from a show I've never watched? Why should I care about the new executive producer of the show and what his motives might be and what his qualifications are or aren't? and why should I care about CBS news and uh
Barry Weiss and what she's doing to it and the changes that uh she's making like if I don't watch this stuff and if you are a person if you are a fellow American of mine of a certain age younger than me or maybe even around my age you may not watch you may not have ever watched CBS News or 60 Minutes or have any direct connection to any of these shows or institutions that are the subject of this story. And you might be asking yourself, why should I care? And I would describe it this way. You might not have any direct interaction in your day-today life with trees. Depending on where you live and what your lifestyle is and what your personal proclivities are, you may not go camping. You may not go for hikes in
the forest. You may not ever find yourself in the woods. You may not climb trees or have ever climbed trees. Trees may not play a significant role in your life. And that's fine. But aren't you glad that trees exist? Wouldn't you rather have trees than not have them? Trees are important because as people often say trees are the lungs of the earth. Trees are what clean the atmosphere. Trees are what naturally through their metabolic processes they exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. They help to create the atmosphere that allows us and all the other oxygen breathing organisms on the planet, which is pretty much all of them to survive. And just as trees are the lungs of the
planet, I would suggest that a free press, a free and honest press functions as the lungs of a democracy. And when you have an agent of that free press, a longstanding institution that has been a part of that free press and has had a reputation going back almost 60 years as being a reliable source of information and being a collection of fearless truth tellers. And when you see a story that's been reported by 60 Minutes, you can be assured of two things. That story is important. It matters to you in some way or another. It matters to the community, to the country, and you can rely on it. You know that what's being reported is accurate and true. And if that institution is under attack, if that
institution is being torn down from within, if people are either resigning from that institution or being fired from that institution and as was the case with Scott Py who had been there for decades and had also anchored the CBS Evening News and was just a pillar of that institution. If people like that are being removed and being replaced by people with little or no qualification for their jobs and are viewed widely and probably accurately as being placed into their positions to please the current presidential administration. If all of that is happening, that is doing damage to the lungs of our democracy. That is an attack on the lungs of our democracy and that is something that we should all be extremely concerned about.
Even if you have never watched a single episode, a single minute of 60 Minutes, you should still care about it. Now, it just so happens I have never been a regular 60 Minutes viewer, but I have watched my share of it over the years. I always kind of would joke with myself that I would know when I had reached the status of being like a senior citizen when I started watching 60 Minutes on a regular basis. For some reason, I've always associated with like an older person's thing. You know, when I was growing up, my parents, when my parents were in like their 20s and 30s and 40s, they never watched 60 Minutes, but my grandparents did. my grandparents who were in their late 40s and their early 50s when I
first knew them. They watched 60 Minutes and they watched other news stuff too. They were just a lot more of news consuming people than I was as a kid or than my parents were as young adults and then, you know, sort of in the middle of their adulthood. So, I would associate 60 Minutes with, you know, being older and I'll know when I get there like, "Oh, I must be old now. I'm watching 60 Minutes all the time." And now I wonder if I'm even going to have that opportunity. Now I wonder if I'm gonna if when I get to be in my 60s, is 60 Minutes even still going to be there? Or if it is there, is it going to be something that is even worth watching? Because one of the nice things about 60 Minutes up until the
last few years has been that it resisted a lot of the changes and a lot of the kind of commercial pressures that have been at work on television journalism. And I speak specifically of here in the United States. I don't know exactly how it works in other countries, although I imagine it's not all that different, but serious, hard-hitting journalism on TV is not so easy to find anymore. 60 Minutes has been one of the few outlets where you can turn to and you can be assured, okay, this is going to be news, this is going to be journalism, this is going to be in-depth reporting about stuff that's actually important. There have been other shows in that same vein come and go over the years. There are shows that still exist
that you can still watch that used to do kind of what 60 Minutes does or did until recently, but don't do it anymore. And that's a shame. And I'm as big a fan of Dline NBC. I don't want to say I'm as big a fan of Dline NBC as anybody because I know there are people on the internet who are just huge fans of Dineine NBC. And I am not quite to that level, but I watch Dine. I listen to the Dine podcast, which is literally just the audio from Dline TV episodes just ripped out and uploaded to the podcast feed. But whatever, that's fine. I listen to it. I enjoy DLine. I like Dine. But DLine, which started out as pretty much a straight news magazine in the vein of 60 Minutes, over the years,
has evolved into basically just true crime. It's just a true crime show. And the same thing with 48 Hours, which is another CBS news magazine that used to be much more of a serious straight news magazine in the vein of 60 Minutes. Now it's pretty much all true crime. Uh 2020 on ABC, same story. Used to be very 60 Minutesish, now true crime. A lot of news magazines that used to do hard journalism are now just doing true crime in order to survive, in order to just get people to watch them and invest in them and so that the show can continue to exist. That's just the commercial reality of television. 60 Minutes hasn't done that. When you want, and this is not to disparrage anybody on Dine or anybody on
48 hours or anybody on 2020, I enjoy their work. But when you tune in to an episode of Deline in 2026, you know that you're doing it to be entertained. You're doing it maybe to be titilated, right? To see something, you know, kind of lurid and maybe a little trashy. You know, that's what it's there for. That's the purpose of it. But when you tune in to 60 Minutes until recently, you knew you were getting news. You were getting journalism. You were getting indepth reporting and that was accurate and reliable and about things that matter. And now we can no longer say that with confidence. And that is a loss. That is a significant loss not just to television
and not just to journalism, but to our democracy. And it's especially harmful knowing that loss has been incurred, those attacks have been inflicted on 60 Minutes in order to please Donald Trump. One of the thing, one of the major points of contention between specifically between Scott P and um Nick Bilton and uh and Barry Weiss, the two sort of executive figures that are responsible for the dismantling of 60 Minutes in general and uh the firing of Scott P in particular, was this feeling on the part of the administration, the uh the management of CBS News, namely Barry Weiss, that uh 60 stories had not been fair enough to Trump. And there's this long, and this is part of Barry Weiss's
long running narrative that media in general is not fair to conservatives. She insists she's not a conservative herself, of course, but the media is just not fair to conservatives and it's not fair to Donald Trump and they need to be more fair to Donald Trump. Imagine a person who wants to be taken seriously and wants to be seen as not an ideologue saying, you know, we need to be more fair to Donald Trump. As journalists, we need to be more fair to Donald Trump. Donald Trump, a man who lies more prolifically and more brazenly than any public figure probably in the entire history of the United States.
A man who's just leave aside all of his other character flaws and all of his other offenses, his criminality, his corruption, his bigotry, his ignorance, his narcissism. Leave all of that just to the side and just focus on his dishonesty. Just isolate that. That alone is disqualifying of him to hold any public office, much less the presidency of the United States. And yet, even now, 10 years into this shit show, we are still told by Trump himself and by his many sickopants and people on his side and people who have attached themselves to him, we're still told people need to be more fair to him. The media is not fair to him. 60 Minutes wasn't fair to him. The way they edited that interview or the way they
handled the Kla Harris interview versus the Trump interview. 60. They need to be more fair to Donald Trump, the liar. The journalists whose job it is supposedly to report the truth need to be more fair to Donald Trump, the famous liar. Think about that. Think about the mentality. Think about how dishonest or also possibly just warped a person's perception has to be to say that and expect to be taken seriously. It boggles my mind. It absolutely boggles my mind that anybody would expect to say that and have someone go, "Yeah, you know what? You're right. We need to be more fair to Donald Trump." Yeah, you're right. He's he's gotten a bum
wrap. anti-Trump bias. You know, there's another much more succinct way to say anti-Trump bias. It's one word, reason. Rationality. If you are an honest, reasonable, reasonably well-informed person, you should have an anti-Donald Trump bias. That is the reasonable position. Because of Donald Trump, because of his actions and his statements, you should be biased against Trump. He's a liar and a crook and an authoritarian and all kinds of other shit that we should be against just as a matter of survival for our democracy and a matter of principle and morality for ourselves. You should have an anti- If you don't have an anti-Trump bias, I don't fucking trust you. That's the way it is. And it's not because I was born hating
Donald Trump or because my parents raised me to hate Donald Trump. It's because I've been paying attention to the motherfucker, especially for the last decade. And oh shit, he can't be trusted. Oh shit, he never tells the truth. Oh shit, he's incompetent and corrupt and a criminal. Officially a criminal. He's been tried and convicted of crimes. He's a criminal. But we can't have any anti-Trump bias. You know, the other thing that was said about Scott P, and I believe this was Nick uh the new executive producer of 60 Minutes, he said, and I think I can't remember if it was uh Nick Bilton or uh Barry Weiss because they've both made statements in the last
couple of days since the firing of Scott P. Um so I may be confusing who said what. They both said basically the same thing, but one of the things they said was Scott P with his criticism of the current management, with his criticism of the new executive producer and of Barry Weiss as the head of CBS News, um, he has broken trust with the company. He's broken trust with CBS News. And that perhaps is his most egregious offense. And that's why he simply had to go. He broke trust. He's a journalist. You know who a journalist's most important trust is with? The public. The truth. That's what the highest loyalty and priority of a journalist is supposed to be. The truth, whatever it is, whoever it makes looks
bad, look bad. Whoever it threatens, that's not that shouldn't be important to a journalist. You are dedicated to the truth. And if the organization you work for is no longer sharing that trust, if the organization you work for is not dedicated to the truth and is not dedicated to earning a trust with the public, then you as a journalist need to break trust with that organization because the trust with the truth and the trust with the public is more important than the trust with any particular organization. And as heartbreaking as I'm sure it was for Scott P to have to say what he said and to then leave that organization to which he has devoted so many years of his life. That was the
right thing. That was what needed to happen and certainly knew he was going to be fired for what he said, but he said it anyway because it needed to be said. And good for him. And wouldn't it be nice if more journalists would say that? Wouldn't it be nice if more journalists said that kind of shit to Trump's face? Wouldn't it be nice if some more people in the White House press corps would say it to his fucking face, would say something that they know is going to get him kicked out? You're a journalist. You're in the White House press corp. Trump says some absolute bullshit that is damaging the country that is imperiling Americans and people all over the world and you say, "You
know what? I'm going to say something." And this is probably going to be the last time I'm ever in this room, at least as long as Trump is here, but I'm going to say it anyway because nobody else is saying it. And it fucking needs to be said. That's what Scott P did because Scott P knew what his job was and he knew what his loyalty was and who he owed that loyalty to and he knew what was being done to 60 Minutes was wrong and was evil and he was not going to be a part of it. Before he got kicked out the door, he was going to say his peace and he did and good for him and I wish there were more people like him. So yeah, you should care, I think, about what is happening to 60 Minutes. Even if you
don't watch 60 Minutes, even if you've never watched it, especially if you're an American, but even if you're not, even if you live in another country, you should care about this story for what it symbolizes. Because if this kind of thing is not happening in your country right now, you should want to make sure that it doesn't happen. And we as Americans should be wanting to reverse it, to stop it, to make sure that it doesn't happen any further than it is happening now. And that it doesn't happen after this. At least not for a while. At least not until that thing happens where everybody forgets about the problem and it comes back because history has a tendency to work that way, unfortunately.
But just as surely as trees are the lungs of the earth, journalism, honest, hard-hitting, reliable journalism that will speak truth to power, that will tell the truth as accurately as it can be discovered. No matter who benefits or stands uh to be harmed by it, no matter who it embarrasses, no matter who it makes look bad, whatever the truth is, tell it to the people. Those kinds of journalists are the lungs of democracy. And democracy cannot survive without them. And anybody who tries to suffocate those lungs, who tries to deprive democracy of that life-giving oxygen, which is the truth, which is accurate facts about what is going on in the world, is not to be trusted, is an enemy of democracy. And
they are acting in a way that they think is to their own short-term benefit, but in the long term is seriously threatening and shortening the life of our democracy. And that is something that everybody should and needs to care about.
