Phelim McAleer: After Trump drove it to distraction, it may be too late to save US media as trust in it is at a historic low

Scott Pelley was one of the most recognisable 60 Minutes correspondents for 37 years. He was also a pompous bore who cultivated a grave, sonorous delivery and presented himself as the model of journalistic seriousness. Then he blew it all up and got fired after he objected to a major shake-up at CBS, the TV station which broadcasts 60 Minutes.

Bari Weiss, an independent journalist who left The New York Times in 2020 after criticising its progressive monoculture, was appointed Editor-in-Chief by the network’s new billionaire Trump supporting owners. She installed Nick Bilton, a magazine journalist, as the new executive producer of 60 Minutes, promising change.

Pelley did not like these independent thinkers being his bosses. At a meeting attended by other CBS News journalists, he publicly attacked Bilton as inexperienced and branded Weiss as unqualified. He accused them both of “murdering” the show.

It is hard to know which is more ridiculous: Pelley thinking he could stay on after such gross insubordination, or presenting himself as the defender of journalism. Weiss and Bilton did not kill 60 Minutes. Pelley and the old guard had already ‘murdered’ its credibility. The evidence of Pelley’s partisan nonsense has been there for years.

I bear the literal scars of his bad journalism, as does my phone. Let me explain.

In 2009 Pelley fronted a 60 Minutes segment on a lawsuit against the oil company Chevron in Ecuador. The case centred on allegations that the oil company had caused severe environmental damage and health problems in the Amazon rainforest. A man called Steven Donziger portrayed himself as a brave environmental lawyer fighting Big Oil on behalf of indigenous communities. Pelley presented the story with little scrutiny of the obvious red flags.

US courts later found that Donziger had bribed an Ecuadorian judge to secure an $18 billion judgment against Chevron. The case collapsed. Donziger was convicted of criminal contempt, served time in federal prison, and was disbarred from practising law in New York and Washington DC. The misleading Pelley report remains online.

I know exactly what kind of operator Donziger is. Once I happened to be in the same Los Angeles restaurant as the lawyer and I tried to ask him questions about the fraud. He assaulted me and smashed my phone. Perhaps he was entitled to be angry – I had written a play about the whole scandal using actual court transcripts. It was called The 18 Billion Dollar Prize. It wasn’t complimentary of Donziger. Pelley, with all his supposed ‘experience’, never seemed to dig that deep. The narrative he pushed was lazy: lawyer pretending to be an environmentalist = good; big oil company = bad.

He is not alone. One of the most notorious examples of 60 Minutes bias came back in 2004 with the ‘Rathergate’ scandal. The programme aired a story, fronted by Dan Rather, based on unauthenticated documents purporting, just before a presidential election, to show that George W. Bush had shirked his duties in the Texas Air National Guard. The memos were exposed as fakes, Rather was forced out.

For years, major US news institutions have been dominated by people who pretended to be neutral while advancing a clear left-wing worldview. The result was coverage that often felt more like activism than journalism. Bari Weiss’s appointment and the removal of figures like Pelley represent a long-overdue correction.

Trust in the US media has collapsed. A Gallup poll last year found that just 28% of Americans have confidence in the mainstream media – a historic low. Ratings for traditional news programmes have declined for years as audiences abandon outlets they no longer trust.

Then came Donald Trump. He refused to play by their rules, ignored their hit pieces, kept winning, and drove journalists to distraction. Any journalistic integrity many still possessed largely evaporated.

Pelley’s firing is welcome. The real winner here is journalism - and America.

• Phelim McAleer is a Co Tyrone born producer/journalist based in Los Angeles