If you have ever worked with or around elitist liberals, then you will almost certainly recognize this phenomenon.
For convenience’s sake, we might simply call it jaw-dropping audacity.
In a clip posted to the social media platform X, longtime reporter Scott Pelley, formerly of CBS News’ “60 Minutes” until his firing Tuesday, insisted that no one associated with the long-running program regarded it as biased.
Pelley made those comments during an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times.
“Why do you think the country thinks you’re biased?” Garcia-Navarro asked, recalling a question posed by Bari Weiss during a meeting with “60 Minutes” senior staffers shortly after her ascent to editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Pelley, who did not attend the meeting in question, nonetheless characterized Weiss’ question as flawed.
Do you trust legacy media outlets such as CBS News?
“But she didn’t offer any kind of a metric,” the now-former correspondent added. “What’s your metric? Why do you think so? Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about? Because we certainly didn’t believe that.”
Scott Pelley says Bari Weiss asked 60 Minutes staffers: “Why do you think the country thinks you’re biased?”
Pelley: “Why do you think so? Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about?”
“Because we certainly didn’t believe that.”
Incredible. pic.twitter.com/dFYYob38Xj
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) June 7, 2026
Elsewhere in the same interview, Pelley made equally jaw-dropping claims.
“We have respected journalists saying that there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over another,” he said in another clip posted to X.
And yes, he actually meant a thumb on the scale for Republicans and against Democrats.
Moments later, he insisted that there now exists “a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at ’60 Minutes’ before.”
“Right now, CBS News is on fire”
Scott Pelley: “We need adult supervision and at the moment we don’t have it. We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. It’s not their fault, but they don’t know what… pic.twitter.com/XFZfn09CZN
— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) June 7, 2026
Pelley also complained about President Donald Trump’s “frivolous, ridiculous lawsuit” against “60 Minutes.
Recall that during the 2024 presidential campaign, “60 Minutes” got caught editing an interview with then-Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to make her answers sound more coherent. The network later settled the lawsuit with the president by agreeing to pay $16 million toward Trump’s presidential library fund.
As for ideological bias in favor of totalitarianism masquerading as liberal democracy, recall, too, that in February 2025, “60 Minutes” ran a fawning interview with German prosecutors, who bragged about arresting people for social media posts.
Still, Pelley said with a straight face and with earnestness in his voice that people at “60 Minutes” think themselves unbiased.
How do we explain this?
For one thing, elite liberals’ delusional worldview stems from self-importance combined with insular living. It amounts to a mathematical formula that produces hypocrisy obvious to everyone but themselves.
Elite liberals, for instance, can reside in gated communities, support open borders, and see no tension between the two. That is because everyone they know thinks the way they do.
Of course, as elitists, they share a contempt for anyone outside their circle. So they give each other credentials, call each other “experts,” and thereby ensure that they never need to take seriously anyone with a non-liberal worldview.
“Liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view,” legendary conservative William F. Buckley once wrote, as quoted in his 2008 London Times obituary, “but it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”
And that explains the jaw-dropping audacity: What we recognize as biased, they see as axiomatic.
A brief personal anecdote will further illustrate the point.
In my younger years, I once worked for what I would imperfectly describe as a conservative-oriented think-tank on a mid-sized campus in the Midwest. One day, a liberal colleague from a different academic department told me that he thought it unusual to find such a “partisan” entity on a college campus.
I don’t recall whether or not I spat out my drink on the spot. But the remark’s jaw-dropping audacity struck me with incredible force. Here, on a college campus of all places, I thought, a liberal has the chutzpah to complain about conservative partisanship?
But he did, and they do. Just as my colleague believed that partisanship only infests academia when it comes from a conservative source, so, too, does Pelley believe that “60 Minutes” never showed bias until the Trump administration came along.
How does one communicate with those who occupy a reality of their own invention? Thus far, we do not have a good answer.
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