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CBS Anchor: 'We Are Getting Big Stories Wrong, Over and Over Again' "Our house is on fire." Daniel Halper May 11, 2013 12:09 PM CBS anchor Scott Pelley said at a speech at Quinnipiac University that journalists "are getting big stories wrong, over and over again." "Our house is on fire," said Pelley. The video of Pelley's speech is courtesy of nowthisnews.com. "These have been a bad few months for journalism," he added. "We're getting the big stories wrong, over and over again." The CBS newsreader was quick to take at least partial blame. "Let me take the first arrow:...

The brother of a top Obama administration official is also the president of CBS News, and the network may be days away from dropping one of its top investigative reporters for covering the administration’s scandals too aggressively. CBS News executives have reportedly expressed frustration with their own reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, who has steadily covered the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack in Libya since late last year. “Network sources” told Politico Wednesday that CBS executives feel Attkisson’s Benghazi coverage is bordering on advocacy, and Attkisson “can’t get some of her stories on the air.” Attkisson, who is in...

The popular CBS reality show "The Amazing Race” is under fire for featuring an episode set in Hanoi, Vietnam, where contestants go to a B-52 Memorial, which is the wreckage of an American bomber plane shot down during the Vietnam War, to find the next clue in their televised round-the-world journey. In the episode, the twisted metal of the downed plane is treated as any other prop, with a bright ‘Amazing Race’ ‘Double-U-Turn’ signed planted in front of it, signifying to contestants the next phase of their scavenger hunt. The show also had contestants learn a song that was performed...

uring CBS's special coverage of the papal election on Wednesday, correspondent Mark Phillips singled out two dissenters from Catholic tradition in the middle of crowd of hundreds of thousands in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, mere minutes after the white smoke went out of the Sistine Chapel's chimney, and before Pope Francis emerged onto the balcony over the piazza. The two activists, who wore pink "ordain women" pins, not only sought to change the Catholic Church's teachings on the all-male priesthood, but spotlighted "LGBT issues [and] reproductive health care" – a thinly-veiled reference to abortion and contraception – as...

On CBS’s Face The Nation this week, host Bob Schieffer asked Ben Affleck point blank, “Have you ever thought about running for public office?” Although he attempted to deflect the question by noting “the state of Massachusetts currently has two extraordinary Senators,” he ended up saying, “well, one never knows.” Schieffer noted there might be a vacancy for him soon, with Senator John Kerry being tapped to be President Obama‘s next Secretary of State. Affleck said, “I’m not one to get into conjecture,” but then said, “I like to be involved.”

CBS ran a puff piece Friday morning on President Obama's visit to hurricane-ravaged Staten Island, which stood in stark contrast to its hostile treatment of President Bush's visit to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. CBS played into the Obama PR strategy, simply noting that he "pledged the government's support" to Staten Island residents and "met with families who've lost everything." In addition, they aired his plea for the insurance companies to support the victims, afterward quoting residents who were upset with the insurance companies. Meanwhile, CBS had no such love for President Bush in 2005 when they reported victims...

Even Dan Rather, the poster child of media bias, admitted on Morning Joe today that it is likely going to be “a good day for Romney.” The Politico reported: Longtime television journalist Dan Rather said on Tuesday that reporters shouldn’t predict elections based on their gut — but added that his tells him Mitt Romney will have a good day. “Something in my gut tells me that it’s going to be a good day for Romney,” Rather said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Listen to President Obama and Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, and you could be forgiven for briefly thinking only one gender is allowed to vote. Both candidates regularly tailor their message to female voters: You can see it in the president's attacks on Romney's desire to cut Planned Parenthood funding and potentially appoint judges to overturn Roe v. Wade, and in Romney's claim that "this president has failed America's women" due to an uptick in female poverty. There's a reason for this: Women are widely perceived as more likely than men to be swing voters. In the battleground state...

Politics is a dirty business, but do the major media outlets need to be part of that 'dirty business', and do the major media outlets need to be more honest in their own selective editing? The admission of mistakes and just plain lies which President Obama made to 60 Minutes interviewer Steve Kroft somehow wound up on the cutting room floor during editing. That seems to indicate a functional bias of omission by CBS, as in the ongoing discussion at this DJ blog posted by sumdume. The 'sin' of omission in editing is seemingly the most difficult to deduce is...

re hours after Politico reported on Republican Congressman Eric Yoder's admitted skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee in Israel, CBS highlighted the story on its Monday morning newscast. By contrast, the network was slow to report on former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner's lewd photo scandal in 2011. On June 1 of that year, ABC and NBC's morning shows reported on the "underwear uproar," while CBS's Early Show punted on the story. The following day, CBS played up conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart's early role in spreading word of the New York liberal's indecent Twitter pic: "Supporters of Weiner note that it...

During an interview of Obama senior campaign adviser David Axelrod on Wednesday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose and Erica Hill bewailed the negative tone of the presidential campaign, hinting that it might turn off voters. However, the anchors let Axelrod rip Mitt Romney's recent foreign policy speech to the VFW without challenge, and failed to ask the adviser about the President's own speech to the organization. Rose set up Axelrod's tirade against Romney with a beyond softball question - on the GOP candidate's slam of Obama: "'Contemptible conduct'; 'a betrayal' -- where are we?" The veteran journalist hinted at his...

Charlie Rose omitted mentioning the continuing high unemployment rate as he interviewed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Tuesday's CBS This Morning. Rose also forwarded a criticism Geithner from the left, that the Cabinet official was "too friendly to the banks, because he knew them from his years at the New York Fed." The anchor also didn't challenge the Obama administration official's assertion that keeping all of the current tax rates would be a "deeply irresponsible thing to do fiscally and economically now. If you do it, it costs a trillion dollars over ten years - a trillion dollars over ten...

Back in 2007 and 2008, it was remarkable watching Barack Obama treated to one puffball interview after another, courtesy of Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes." Kroft compared him to Abe Lincoln and oozed about his "political poetry." But it's simply irresponsible, after three and a half years of President Obama wrecking the economy, that CBS -- now with anchor Charlie Rose -- is still in puffery mode. There's a certain level of contempt on the part of CBS. It could and should focus its attention on the plight of every family struggling with unemployment or a house that's underwater financially...

“‘Bullet Button’ Used To Get Around California Gun Laws,” CBS 5 San Francisco reported Tuesday. “CBS 5 went undercover to a recent gun show at the Cow Palace in Daly City and found ‘California legal’ assault rifles throughout,” they claim. It’s a non-story, really, as their undercover team found nothing illegal—they weren’t even looking for that—or that couldn’t have been obtained openly. The entire purpose of the “investigation” appears to be to gin up public frenzy about a legal device that allows for changing magazines on semi-automatic firearms that comply with California’s specific model and cosmetic features bans. “I've emailed...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Scott Pelley at this debate Saturday night was amazing to watch. This is the anchor of the CBS Evening News, and he thought he had Newt Gingrich twisted in circles over foreign policy. At one point, Pelley got this contorted, smug, all full-of-himself smile on his face while he could not have been more wrong about something. Newt slapped him down and put him in his place, but Pelley to this moment doesn't know that that's what happened! Newt put this guy in his place. Pelley still thinks that he won that little tete-a-tete. I'm convinced he...

Taking a page from Ronald Reagan, Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Saturday sought to use humor to rebound from his much-noted debate flub earlier in the week. That flub, a 53-second brain freeze that was replayed endlessly on news shows, had him forgetting the name of the Department of Energy, the third federal agency he pledges to eliminate. So Perry was quick to cut off CBS’ Scott Pelley, one of the debate moderators in South Carolina, when he began a question, saying, “Governor Perry, you advocate the elimination of the Department of Energy. If you eliminate the Department of Energy...”...

Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann’s campaign is expressing outrage over an internal CBS memo that they said is proof the network mistreated the Minnesota congresswoman during Saturday night’s CBS News/National Journal Debate. The email was accidentally sent to the Bachmann campaign by CBS News. The campaign decided to release the email to show what they believe was a planned effort to limit questions to Bachmann. Bachmann’s campaign manager blasted CBS for what he called “concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows.” “The liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message and limiting...

Following Saturday’s GOP CBS/National Journal debate, the Michele Bachmann campaign accused CBS News of organizing a biased event by purposefully keeping her questions to a minimum. After accidently receiving an internal email from John Dickerson – the newly appointed political director for CBS News – her campaign released a screenshot of the correspondence to reporters. Via The Hill:  Dickerson was responding to an email sent to CBS News staffers discussing the possibility of booking Bachmann for a webcast interview. The initial email notes that Alice Stewart, Bachmann's spokeswoman, was included in the email chain, but Dickerson appeared not to have...

The first broadcast network presidential debate this year, which ended its national telecast and switched to a choppy livestream feed two-thirds of the way through the event, produced a storm of complaints from viewers across the country and two of the candidates on the no-frills debate stage in Spartanburg, S.C. CBS’s foreign policy debate, co-sponsored by National Journal, offered unusually detailed discussion of policy and a format that was free of many of the literal bells and whistles of more slickly-produced face-offs. But the confusing format — the televised portion for most of the nation ended after an hour and...

f there was a loser on the debate stage tonight, it was CBS. First, they scheduled their debate on a Saturday night between two major football games. Then they decide to only broadcast the first hour of their 90-minute debate. Then their Internet feed failed for the final 30 minutes. This was CBS’s first and only debate — and it showed. Scott Pelley was a terrible moderator. He treated the men who might be the next commander in chief like schoolchildren, cutting them off in mid-sentence, lecturing them to answer his questions. He even lectured Newt Gingrich on policy, telling...