Newscaster Lesley Stahl claims she “doesn’t know what to do” about the embarrassing demise of the legacy media.
She was lamenting to her colleague, Peggy Noonan, that “we are at the point where even the president,” then corrected herself saying, “Elon Musk,” asserted that legacy media is dead. She appeared extremely worried, spilling her deepest concerns, in front of an empathetic audience gathered at the 92nd St. YMCA studio in New York.
It was as if Stahl was having an out-of-body experience, where she failed to factor in herself, in accounting for the reason why audiences were abandoning network news in droves. You know you’re in trouble as an award-winning reporter when the show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” on the Food Network manages to pull in higher ratings than the 24-hour news coverage, CNN.
“I don’t know how it (media) recovers,” Stahl confessed: “It is sort of… kind of hobbling along.”
There was some editing in her statement: She didn’t require the qualifier of “sort of,” “kind (of)” hobbling along. Sounding like sorority sisters, Stahl then confessed to Noonan, “I’m in a very dark place about it.” The gal-pal team then proceeded to engage in a hug-fest to lift up each other spirits, never hinting at they might be part of the problem.
“We’re talking about something so essential,” Noonan offered in her media overview. “You don’t want to say we’ll see. Or, maybe the world will end. We’ll see.” Wow! Noonan, in a moment of candid reflection, had actually compared something “so essential” as corporate media, and it being thrown on the trash heap of cancelled programing, with the world ending.
Such serious contemplation negates the wider view of just how they got into such a “dark place.” Still, they went along their merry way, as two titans in the media, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their smugness and Trump-bashing served as an integral part of the toxic behavior that fueled the rot in the “legacy media.”
Noonan proved it didn’t matter how nonsensical a joke or outright lie at Trump’s expense was -- it was still worth working into the conversation. She made an off-the-cuff quip, shortly after the November election, when President-elect Trump was at the top of news reports in more than 100 countries, saying: “We haven’t been seeing much of Mr. Trump,” and “I’m enjoying that.”
The audience laughed appreciatively. So what if the joke indicated the speaker appeared clueless about an avalanche of news overtaking every newsroom in the nation? You must say this -- Stahl and Noonan know their audience, no matter how much it may be shrinking.
Once the laughter stopped, Stahl may have found it productive to engage in some good-old fashioned reporting to figure out what she “could do” to better understand the media’s abysmal ratings. And even more concerning, the loss of public trust. In her 53-year journalism career, she never thought she’d witness her once-premiere news program, “60 Minutes,” becoming increasingly irrelevant in a post-Trump election world. Ratings stayed in the toilet bowl, as one CBS executive noted, as the show pulled in a pitiful five million viewers in mid-November.
It wouldn’t take much digging for Stahl to find out what’s going on in audienceville. She, like her colleagues, would have to get up out of their chairs, leave their network buildings and stop relying on corrupted news sources. (That would include themselves.)
The best -- and obvious -- place to start would be for Stahl and Noonan to review comments made by viewers watching their unscripted exchange. Reactions from the audience is merely a click away on the accompanying YouTube comment thread: The media titans may have appeared untroubled by their intense partisanship, but viewers were taking a dimmer view.
One viewer identified as “@CharlieWhitmore,” was diligent enough to perform Stahl’s job for her: He reviewed one of her most startling Trump-bashing moments on “60 Minutes.” “I went back and reviewed Leslie’s interview with Trump in October 2020,” he wrote. “Leslie you are the problem…” He referred to Stahl’s pathological tendency, like her colleagues, to disbelieve and discredit (then) President Trump and their refusal to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story. This, in turn, would have opened the door to investigating the “Biden crime family’s behavior,” President Trump claimed, and their influence peddling to negotiate lucrative contracts.
The snippet below speaks volumes about Stahl acting more as a White House spokesperson as opposed to a working journalist.
“He’s in the midst of a scandal,” President Trump said referencing Hunter Biden’s lap top’s incriminating content.
“He’s not,” Stahl interrupted. “He’s not. No.”
Later in the interview, Stahl claimed the Delaware computer contents had been “investigated and discredited.” This attitude of nothing-to-see-here-folks has become an integral part of the legacy media. They never failed in their efforts to come to the defense of the Biden Family along with Democrat operatives' criminal activities.
“It can’t be verified,” Stahl repeated numerous times of the laptop. She was relying, of course, on her anonymous sources, corrupted intelligence contacts and biased news outlets. Nothing in the interview indicated that Stahl would divert from her political ideology and runaway bias.
“What can’t be verified?” Trump asked.
“The laptop!” Stahl responded as if confirming the obvious.
“The biggest scandal,” Trump continued, 'was when they spied on my campaign.”
“There’s no real evidence of that,” Stahl said never wavering from her ludicrous and now embarrassingly false version of events. Owning up to this shameful chapter of reporting wasn’t on Stahl’s agenda, nor was correcting her distorted worldview.
Other viewer reactions were equally revealing, and not very sparing in their comments of Stahl and Noonan:
“Madame Stahl, you reap what you sow,” wrote @I.marciago5030, “Just listening to you (makes it) easy to understand why the corporate media (has) lost all credibility.”
“Lesley, thank you for all the good work you put into helping destroy legacy media,” responded another @woodyharrelson2624.
“Lesley Stahl just doesn’t get it. No wonder legacy media is dying,” wrote @Grad1067.
A few of the remarks were dripping in sarcasm including: “Big shout-out to these two ladies for helping Trump get elected. Bravo,” wrote @neildepoy77320
It might prove useful, for Stahl, to juxtapose the “60 Minutes” sparring match between herself and President-elect Trump in the wake of viewing the irrefutable facts. Sadly, Stahl appeared unwilling to take a moment of introspection to understand her personal responsibility -- after all, she’s a big-deal journalist -- for a media that has become corrupted by its own bias.
Instead, she spent a moment fawning over herself and offered up a different interpretation of the exchange between herself and President Trump. She recounted, without a hint of irony, that she asked the president in October 2020: “Why do you keep pounding on the press?”
Trump, being Trump, offered a pragmatic answer: “I do it and I repeat it because that way fewer people are going to believe you.”
Image: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service
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