After decades of left-wing bias, every segment an attack on conservatives, and especially so against President Trump, 60 Minutes has decided to take a curiously rightward turn.
It was obvious enough in its three segments last night, all three of which had some kind of nod to conservatives.
They can be viewed on 60 Minutes's site here.
The first began as a segment on the hideousness of the Chinese communist regime, hounding dissidents around the world in the kind of human rights violations only conservatives care about, going after the decent people, following them from country to country, as the rest of the world's focus goes to business deals with the behemoth.
Anna Kwok: So every single day I wake up, I open my social media, and then I would see people talking about how, if I keep talking-- here in the United States, they will come kidnap me and-- take my body to the Chinese Consulate so that they can send me back to China.
Norah O'Donnell: How are you viewed by the Chinese government?
Anna Kwok: If I do go back to Hong Kong, it's gonna be life imprisonment. So basically they see me as a traitor, as someone who betrays-- the Chinese government and the Hong Kong government.
Norah O'Donnell: And what's the crime you've committed?
Anna Kwok: They think that fighting for democracy, wanting a say in our own future is a crime.
Norah O'Donnell: The United States is known as the land of the free. Do you feel free here?
Anna Kwok: Honestly, with China's long arm repression, it's difficult to feel free anywhere in the world. The thing about the Chinese government is that you can leave the country, you can leave the territory, but you can never actually leave their governance.
After we met her, Anna kwok's father and brother were arrested in Hong Kong. She is currently seeking political asylum in the U.S.
In March, the Trump administration announced sanctions against officials in Hong Kong who have targeted her and 18 other prominent activists living abroad.
That's not standard 60 Minutes fare that we have seen. They even put in a good word for President Trump.
More likely, they would go with a story about Russian or Saudi dissidents hounded by their regimes, the better to attack President Trump's efforts to establish good working relations with these countries.
The Chinese segment didn't have any of that -- just straight tyrannical behavior from a regime that spies a lot on us and has grown too big for its britches. Its communist underpinnings have yet to be addressed. In general, that's Republican fare, given how many Democrats have climbed into bed with China's regime -- Tim Walz, Eric Swalwell, Joe Biden, and many more.
It got even more rightward with the second segment, a feature about a defense industry entrepreneur named Palmer Luckey, who had a new concept of defense contracts, which was to produce the AI products before the contracts were negotiated, and use them to arm allies, too. Luckey had started up several companies in his past, one of which was purchased by Mark Zuckerberg, which led to a job with Zuck's companies.
60 Minutes explored his firing from the company, and allowed the man to say it involved his campaign donation to President Trump in 2016 without cutting that segment out.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Why did you get fired?
Palmer Luckey: Well, you know, everyone's got a different story, but it boils down to I gave $9,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. To be a Trump supporter in 2016-- you know, this was at the height of the election insanity and derangement in Silicon Valley. And so I think that a lot of people thought back then that you cou-- you could just fire a Trump supporter.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied that Luckey was fired for his political views.
They didn't go too deeply with this topic, but they let him have his say and didn't argue with him. It was pretty interesting that they featured him at all, given his Trump support. Not like them at all.
Then there was a third segment on Cajun and Zydeco music, claiming they were growing in popularity, though they didn't cite any data. They said a Cajun musical group played in Brooklyn,"in Red Hook, of all places" which anyone who knows anything about New York would not find unusual, given that it's a hipster redoubt. I discovered Cajun music in New York myself when I lived there, decades ago, so I am not convinced there's a new upsurge of interest in the music, though perhaps there is.
They didn't feature the music all that much at all, just snippets of accordian riffs and the like. (Objectively speaking, the music really is good, so they should have worked harder getting a really good musical sequence to explain its appeal.)
The segment got interesting though as it delved into cultural details, particularly on the Cajun side of the equation. Interviewing a young white Cajun musician, they asked him if they thought his music was a way to preserve his cultural heritage and he said adamantly believed that.
Jon Wertheim: You have a saying, you say a lot that's in some of your song lyrics. You wanna tell us what it is?
Jourdan Thibodeaux: Tu vis ta culture ou tu tues ta culture, il y a pas de milieu. Means, "You either live your culture or you kill your culture. There's no in between."
Jon Wertheim: What do you mean?
Jourdan Thibodeaux: You see this-- this vanishing of cultures, of dialects, of-- of everything to just create this one generic human, you know. And it's really sad to me. So I'm gonna get up every day and I'm gonna live my culture today. I think it's every individual's responsibility to maintain who they are as a people.
That last sentence would have been held high as an example of white supremacy if it had been broadcast during the old 60 Minutes era. They included it in this one, and just let him say what he had to say now.
All of which suggests that Scott Pelley's temper tantrums of the past few episodes were done, and someone has ridden herd on them to balance out their reporting. Perhaps the merger with Paramount is on the table and CBS wants federal approval. Perhaps they actually want something from President Trump so they are now trying to flatter him. Or maybe they want to increase their viewership.
Whatever it is, it's weird stuff, a leopard changing its spots overnight. All the same, these were good segments, easily more interesting than previous fare. One wonders what made them take that pretty obvious right turn in front of our faces.