Trump turns the tables on “60 Minutes”
You may have heard that Trump somewhat prematurely walked out of a “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl, and also said he would be posting a video of the entire unedited interview to demonstrate the tactics of press exhibited there. You can watch it and read some excerpts here.
One segment:
…Stahl continually dismissed [the Hunter Biden emails] as “unverifiable” and unimportant.
Trump: “It’s incredibly important. Whether or not a man running for office is corrupt. If he’s taken money from China and Ukraine and Russia. It’s incredibly important. It’s the biggest scandal out there, Leslie. I think it’s one of the biggest scandals we’ve ever seen and you won’t cover….He’s gone into hiding. For 5 days he’s been in hiding.”
LS: “He’s preparing for your debate… Why are you *coming after me* about not going after Biden? You’ve asked me 5, 7 times?”
She went on to ask him the same questions over and over again without a hint of irony.
Sure thing, Leslie. Biden’s not been in hiding during these final days of the campaign, he’s just taking five full days to prepare for a debate that will be rigged in his favor.
If he can keep his cool and that demeanor he showed with Stahl tonight in the debate, then it should be good to watch.
This has always been true with “60 Minutes”. Forty years ago, they did a story on a nuclear plant in Illinois. The power plant operators had the good wisdom to bring their own cameraman and make a continuous un-edited record. When the highly edited show came on, twisting the statements made on film, the power company showed the actual record. DIdn’t do the m a lot of good but was a warning to anyone following.
Seems like a shrewd move on Trump’s part – he gets ahead of the narrative, instead of trying to contain or rebut their spin, he dominates the raw interview (and had her a little flustered) and gets his preferred message out once again, and he keeps the hot potato of “laptopgate” front and center just hours before the debate, while keeping the pressure on the debate commission to re-introduce foreign policy as a topic. Reaffirming the right’s belief in the bias of the media is really just bonus. Nicely played.
Full and unedited white house camera on the interview is on face book at
https://www.facebook.com/153080620724/videos/350524406214941
About 20 years ago when I lived in Dallas one of my friends was the CEO of a national company that was not too large but had good recognition. Both the CEO and one of his VPs had told my that they were going to be featured on 60 Minutes about the way the treated and motivated their executive staff. A month later I asked them how it went and they said that their company was supposed to have management motivate by positive friendly high rewards but when the cameras and crew showed up to do the filming and told them what they were after they said there must have been a mistake because they had already filmed the positive management and they needed to film the high stress perform for high reward or your fired and out the door style. My friends said they wanted the exposure for the company so they took about an hour to read and rewrite their parts, explained to the staff that they were going to be the tough guy management and then it was on with the show and national exposure. Don’t ever let the facts get in the way.
Does anyone remember a Presidential candidate, with 1 month left before the election, taking 5 days off the campaign trail for any reason?
My wife and I just watched the full unedited interview. I’m now eager to see if CBS has the guts to air their version of it. My wife thinks they will find a reason to bury and blame Trump’s “dishonesty”.
One thing is certain: POTUS Trump has one great big set of brass cajones on him.
I recall reading (maybe ten years ago) that Charles Chaput, the recently retired archbishop of Philadelphia (and a well known conservative cleric) insisted on his own recording of any interview with a mainstream reporter.
Doing so is utterly sensible. Whatever the cost, or logistical difficulty, it is more than worth it.
For those with eyes to see, Trump just destroyed 60 minutes credibility. How the hate must now burn in their hearts.
years ago there was a slander case against 60 Minutes about Medicaid fraud. the MD they trashed was asked if he wanted a cup of coffee at the beginning of the interview . His ” yes” was spliced to a different question.
Werner Erhard, the est/Landmark creator I keep talking about, was smeared so badly on “60 Minutes” he had to sell everything, turn his companies over to family and colleagues and leave the US.
I grant that Erhard is a sketchy character and I weary of the airbrushed image he and his followers present like he was some combination of Socrates, Gandhi and Elon Musk, but his “60 Minutes” interview was largely a hatchet job that Erhard should have seen coming.
________________________________________________________
[Erhard’s] adversity came to a head in 1991 when CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired an eighteen-minute segment on Werner Erhard, est, and the Forum, incorporating conversations with Erhard, and his daughter Celeste, along with disclosure of the tax allegations.
It wasn’t hard to paint Erhard as a sleazeball. He was confident, tan, rich, irreverent, a salesman by trade, he owned his own airplane, drove a black Mercedes with a vanity plate that said “SO WUT?”,[13] and he lived on a yacht. Despite the strong ego Erhard projected, he ironically became a victim of his own success—though according to his own philosophy, no one did him in but himself.
A more simple view of Erhard’s growing problems point to several people responsible for accusations that were, as it turns out, false. Well after the “60 Minutes” segment aired, his daughter Celeste confessed that she’d been offered a half-million dollar share in a pending book contract in exchange for the allegations, and the IRS, too, later retracted their claim, and paid Erhard $200,000 in a lawsuit he initiated. The “60 Minutes” segment was filled with so many factual discrepancies that the transcript was made unavailable with this disclaimer: “This segment has been deleted at the request of CBS News for legal or copyright reasons.”
–“Est, Werner Erhard and The Corporatization of Self-Help”
https://believermag.com/est-werner-erhard-and-the-corporatization-of-self-help/
Another thing that occurs to me is that I get the impression that Trump and Pence are really on the same page and might even have become friends. That can’t be said for all Presidents and VPs. And they may not have started out completely friend or even friendly beyond their partnership.
Neither here nor there, just an observation after watching Trump’s preferred edit.
Geoffrey Britain:
60 Minutes still has credibility?
For that matter, does anybody below the age of 70 watch it anymore? I remember my parents getting bored and/or disgusted with it in about 1983.
I wonder if Leslie Stahl even remembers when she sold out. I doubt any of them do. No sense of shame or honor. The Fourth Estate indeed.
This is my 60 Minutes #WalkAway story.
I call it that because we used to be big fans of the show.
In the late 70s or early 80s (don’t remember exactly when), they did a report on a case in Utah involving some dispute surrounding an orchard, painting a persuasively damaging picture of the owners, as they were, and are, wont to do.
AesopSpouse — in private law practice at the time — actually knew the facts of the case.
The show was a complete hatchet job.
We never watched again.
“I wonder if Leslie Stahl even remembers when she sold out.” – WWW
You don’t have to “sell out” if you are supporting the side you believe in.
might even have become friends.
Cordial yes. Each respecting what the other brings to the table, yes. Personal friends? Don’t think so.
Although it’s interesting how that works. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew had many things in common. And they didn’t care for each other’s company at all. Don’t think their wives were more than pro-forma friendly, either. I think the Nixon daughters made a point of attempting to persuade the Agnew daughters to attend their father’s funeral but do not know if the Agnew daughters actually made the trip.
He is doing a Jordan Peterson, because they wanted to avoid a Sarah Palin, where conservatives saw the interview and bought immediately into the narrative. Then it would be 3x harder to reverse. It happened in real time in the comments here.
“Did you see her two interviews? Horrible. No way”.
This was back when conservatives pretended the main sewer media was fair and objective news. After they refused to believe in it, but still believed in it 85% of the time.
Only until now do they actually begin refusing to believe in fake news.
Ymarsakar:
If you’re referring to the Gibson interviews of Sarah Palin in 2008 – you are incorrect about what was said on this blog about them (except by trolls in the comments, who were not conservatives or even Republicans). Here’s the post and the comments about that interview.
No one here bought into the narrative, except the trolls.
“I wonder if Leslie Stahl even remembers when she sold out.”
She’s 78 years old. She’s been at “60 Minutes” for 29 years. She may not be in cognitive decline like a certain candidate for President but I’ll bet it’s been at least a decade since Stahl was putting in the bare minimum 50-60 hours a week you’d need to do her job adequately. Stahl hasn’t functioned as a journalist for a long time now.
Mike