Dear 60 Minutes,
Please stop trying to cover your hack journalism with ever-worsening hackneyed excuses.
Thank you.
Glad I could blow off the steam about 60 Minutes’s dumb attack on Governor Ron DeSantis and his supposed sweet and secret deal with the Publix stores to distribute coronavirus vaccines across Palm Beach County, Florida. For giving the ubiquitous supermarket chain the gig to dole out the vaccines, 60 Minutes attempted to show DeSantis was on the take. A series of $25,000 donations – $100,000 in all – had been given to DeSantis’s PAC.
Of course, Publix gives money to everyone in Florida, but sure, 60 Minutes, that must be the reason why DeSantis gave the job to the store with the most outlets in the area. Absolutely diabolical. 60 Minutes’s reasoning, to the extent there was any, was: couldn’t DeSantis give that job to another grocery store chain with fewer outlets to make it less convenient for the old farts in Palm Beach to get to in their golf carts?
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I’ll let The Federalist go over the bill of particulars:
Florida vaccinations were prioritized for the elderly not because they are far and away the most vulnerable demographic to hospitalization or death from the coronavirus, CBS “reported,” but because they are largely whiter, richer, and “more likely to vote for” DeSantis. According to Alfonsi, it was “pay to play.”
The network deceptively edited a video of a DeSantis press conference to portray Alfonsi coming out on top, despite the full clip showing DeSantis dismantling her narrative. The conspiracy goes that because of a routine and paltry political contribution from Publix last year, a contribution that totaled less than 3 percent of what DeSantis got in political contributions for February alone and records of which are publicly available, the GOP governor “rewarded” the supermarket’s pharmacy with “exclusive rights to distribute the vaccination in Palm Beach.”
But CBS came back and claimed that it stood by its story, and still pushed a pay-for-play narrative suggesting that old people make more donations to GOP candidates. Wow, what a blockbuster. And the sun came up today also. We’ll be waiting for a 60 Minutes expose´ on this.
A network official told Fox News hey, we’ve been around a long time, so give us a pass, while ignoring the key act of journalistic malpractice.
For over 50 years, the facts reported by 60 MINUTES have often stirred debate and prompted strong reactions. Our story Sunday night speaks for itself.
CBS claimed that DeSantis and State Emergency Management Director Jared Moskowitz, a Broward County Democrat, wouldn’t sit for an interview. Moskowitz says he gave 60 Minutes a long, though off-camera, interview, where he said the Publix allegations were big fat lies.
This idea why @Publix was picked has been utter nonsense. We reached out to all pharmacies and they were the only one who at the time could execute on the mission. The federal government delayed the federal pharmacy program and we yet again stepped up first to serve more seniors https://t.co/IJJgS9T2dn
— Jared MASKowitz 😷 (@JaredEMoskowitz) March 2, 2021
I don’t blame DeSantis for not giving 60 Minutes a longer interview. Look what happened when he did talk to them.
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DeSantis had already told 60 Minutes that Palm Beach County officials “calculated that 90% of our seniors live within a mile of a Publix” and that seemed the most efficient way to give out the vaccine. But correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi wasn’t having it.
CBS and 60 Minutes have a playbook: lie with impunity, smear their political opponents and deceptively edit out facts that eviscerate their bogus, partisan narratives.
CBS and 60 Minutes are dedicated to leaving the truth on the cutting room floor. https://t.co/uuadVOXFVE
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) April 7, 2021
On Sunday night, Alfonsi was back with the tick, tick, ticking intro to the news magazine’s mailbag section. Once again the network tried to put a face of propriety on its smear job.
Instead of explaining the controversy and her part in it, Alfonsi went to the ol’ inbox to read viewers’ reactions to the report. The Media Research Center’s Brent Baker noted on Twitter that 60 Minutes hid behind the comments.
Sunday’s @60Minute ended with @Sharyn_Alfonsi reading comments about her shoddy hit piece on @RonDeSantisFL. She didn’t acknowledge doing anything wrong. “Some viewers, including a retired newsman, applauded the story.” #60Minutes
Sunday’s @60Minutes ended with @Sharyn_Alfonsi reading comments about her shoddy hit piece on @RonDeSantisFL. She didn’t acknowledge doing anything wrong. “Some viewers, including a retired newsman, applauded the story.” #60Minutes pic.twitter.com/v5qEwT5PXc
— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) April 12, 2021
The “retired newsman” by the name of Nick Boryack, who wrote to the netowork, told the reporter that she did a great job of sticking it to DeSantis.
Ron DeSantis will continue to deny, refute… call your reporting a witch hunt… I can only hope… that you continue to investigate and expose the truth.
But, of course, everyone suspected that the “retired newsman” was Dan “Courage” Rather, who lost his CBS anchor gig after lying on 60 Minutes about another Republican. ( … Gee, why is it always Republicans? Another unsolved mystery.)
“One retired newsman said Alfonsi’s hatchet job was outstanding journalism in a note written with 1973 Microsoft Word.”
— Razor (@hale_razor) April 12, 2021
You’ll remember, of course, the old Mary Mapes, Dan Rather, fake-documents-written-in-font-not-created-for-the-IBM -Selectric-type-writers-until-after-George-W.-Bush’s alleged skullduggery story.
I’ve seen this movie before. pic.twitter.com/uh2pirrphj
— Will Collier (@willcollier) April 12, 2021
But the newsman turned out to be somebody nobody had ever heard of and not the notorious Rather. We think.
Talk host John Steigerwald gave Alfonsi a slow clap for the smattering of applause the story garnered from “some viewers.”
“Some viewers applauded the story.” Some viewers? Ok. Never mind. Nice job
“Some viewers applauded the story.” Some viewers? Ok. Never mind. Nice job
— John Steigerwald (@Steigerworld) April 12, 2021
The reporter mentioned some letters from people who castigated her over her floundering attack piece.
CBS is still in denial about running an inaccurate story about the vaccine rollout in Florida. And it refuses, obviously, to correct the record on 60 Minutes.
We understand why it might be uncomfortable for the network to look into, for example, the vaccine bumbling, nursing home patient killing, and self-congratulatory buffoonery of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who plies his trade in the network’s home state, New York.
He’s a Democrat and their governor.
