Goodbye 60 Minutes — John Miller’s “Whatever You Say” Report on the NSA — Stupider You Could Not Get

© 2013 Peter Free

 

16 December 2013

 

 

Citation

 

60 Minutes, Inside the NSA, CBS News (16 December 2013)

 

 

Trumpeting the party line as if were investigative journalism

 

60 Minutes presenter John Miller apparently thought it was his job to let the NSA parrot an unchallenged string of justifications for overturning the Fourth Amendment in the United States, simultaneously casting leaker Edward Snowden in the role of the Devil incarnate.

 

Sara Morison, writing for The Wire, evaluated the show accurately:

 

 

Yes, that's right: The NSA is "defending our civil liberties and privacy," according to NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander. Upon hearing this, Miller just nods. If you're looking for a journalist or journalism that challenges the NSA or asks hard questions, this isn't it.

 

Instead, he lets Alexander tell us, once again, how the NSA only collects our phone metadata, and how that doesn't reveal all that much anyway. Except, of course, when it does, but Miller doesn't ask about that. Nor did he ask about the email metadata the NSA used to collect.

 

Miller does ask if Alexander ever considered resigning from his post, given that a "20-something-year-old high school dropout contractor managed to walk out with in essence the crown jewels" under his watch. Alexander says he did, but was told that he shouldn't have to, since he didn't do anything wrong and this could have happened to anyone.

 

After that, we hear about how the NSA has saved us from a potentially "catastrophic" cyber-attack that may or may not have come from China and may or may not have actually happened. You'll have to take their world for it. Miller does.

 

© 2013 Sara Morrison, '60 Minutes': NSA Good, Snowden Bad, The Wire (15 December 2013)

 

Miller’s reporting was so bad, that I had to turn the television off — since I make it a practice not to listen to Federal Government officials flapping their (nearly always) lying lips in response to inanely unpenetrating questions.

 

Another platform for the Police State to spout its self-justifying nonsense, we do not need.

 

 

The moral? — For me, “Goodbye 60 Minutes”  

 

You may remember that 60 Minutes recently made itself a politicized laughing stock with the lies it told in its account of the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans on 11 September 2012.

 

Now comes John Miller’s unintentional parody of investigative journalism.

 

Whatever is going on at CBS News and 60 Minutes is not investigative journalism.

 

It is, instead, ordinary money-grubbing BS — cast in an appealing and concealing flavor of the week.  The flavor need have no relationship to truth or insight and probably won’t.

 

Two virtually back-to-back strikes of this jaw-dropping magnitude and you're out.