Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The left's institutional control is falling apart. They thought they had the government, and then President Trump won, and the Republicans won. And they thought they had the media as well. More than anything, they thought they had the media.
But last night, that magical world dissolved before their very eyes as CBS News fired longtime 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley, making clear that no longer would that show be an agitprop outlet for the left. But without institutional control, what happens to the left? What do they do next? The answer, they move even further to the left. We'll get into all of that.
Plus, Megyn Kelly on Sean Ryan and Marco Rubio destroys and a lot more. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Chapter 2: Why did CBS fire Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes?
Well, folks, it looks like another ex-Legacy journalist is joining Substack. His lifelong dream is coming true. Scott Pelley is headed over to Substack. So here is the left wing and mainstream media narrative today. 60 Minutes was a magical place filled with objective journalism. And then right wing fire breather Barry Weiss and her evil Zionist paymasters arrived.
And now they're firing stalwart old style journalist Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes. How dare they touch this bastion of journalistic integrity? That narrative is not so true. 60 Minutes was never objective. It was always a left-wing outlet.
Chapter 3: What implications does the firing of Scott Pelley have for the Left?
That's the reason why the left is angry that changes are being made today. If it were objective and Barry Weiss made changes, they would not be so upset. They saw this as their institutional preserve. And now that preserve has been violated. Like a naturally beautiful piece of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is being touched by human hands. It must not be.
Also, they've been promoting this notion that Barry Weiss is some sort of flaming right-winger. That's crazy. I'm sorry, that's nuts. I'm friends with Barry. Barry is not right-wing on a huge number of issues. She is pro-LGBT, obviously. She is pro-choice, obviously. She used to describe herself as a center-left person. If you went back about 25 years, she would be a moderate Democrat.
Barry Weiss is the person described in the famous Elon Musk, Colin Wright, swipe right chart. You know, the one that shows that in 2008, people who are on the center left were next to the people on the left and people on the right were far away. And that as the left moved further and further to the left, people who are center left were still close to the center.
And then by now, everybody who is center left is now considered right wing because the left is just so far to the left. Barry Weiss and Bill Maher basically have the same political positions. I disagree with both of them a lot. The fact that Barry Weiss is now considered some sort of flaming right winger is nuts. It is crazy towns. It's crazy towns.
The reason that's happened, obviously, is because the left has gone so totally insane. And so people like Barry, who I am sure voted Democrat many times, is now considered, again, some sort of arch conservative. So what is the actual story here? The key story here? The real key story here is the Democrats are losing control of a lot of their key institutions.
That if there's any overarching sort of theme to the Trump era, it is that Democrats thought they had undeniable control of basically every key institution in American life.
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Chapter 4: How has the Left reacted to changes in mainstream media?
And one by one, That's coming apart for them. So 60 Minutes, again, was considered sort of the tip of the spear in the objective journalism universe. And I'm using scare quotes there for those who can't see, because those of us who've been watching mainstream legacy media for a long time recognize that the so-called objective media is usually anything but.
Usually it is just a liberal leaning group of people who pretend to be objective. In any case, Scott Pelley was fired. And the reason he was fired is because There were changes made over at 60 Minutes. Nick Bilton, who's a tech journalist and filmmaker, he was appointed to shake up 60 Minutes because, again, the ratings were not amazing.
And also they'd had some problems in terms of journalistic integrity. Well, at this point, Bilton, who's sort of introducing himself, he was accosted by Scott Pelley publicly at this meeting earlier this week. This was after CBS had fired Tanya Simon, according to the New York Times, the previous executive producer and her deputy, along with Sharon Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
Those were a couple of the show's correspondents. Pelley referred to these as a Black Thursday. The absolute self-centered arrogance of referring to the firing of your colleagues as Black Thursday. Yeah. How will the American Democratic experiment survive without Sharon Alfonsi as an assistant reporter on 60 Minutes? This is why I always said about Jim Acosta when he was over on CNN.
Ladies, find you a man who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta. But that's true for an enormous number of journalists in the online space and pseudo journalists in the online space. They are just narcissists. The only thing they regret about the camera is that it is not a mirror. In any case, Bilton was speaking to the crowd and he said broadcast is an ice cube that is melting.
He said, Barry loves this institution. She loves 60 Minutes. At this point, Scott Pelley gets up in self, right?
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of Barry Weiss in the media landscape?
You can see him doing this in full self-righteous mode, knowing, of course, that he's trying to get himself fired because let's be clear, that's what he wants. He wants to be a martyr. If you're going to have your airtime reduced, better to be a martyr. If you're Colin Kaepernick and you're about to get benched, much better to kneel for the national anthem than to go out quietly.
So Pelly, who is very likely to have his role reduced to 60 Minutes, decided this was the moment. It was a moment of bravery and resistance. Maybe they'll make a movie about him, his bravery and resistance. So he got up and he said, she is murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it. And she's been doing exactly that. She has no qualifications for her job.
By the way, let me just explain. The qualifications for being a reporter is you go and report. It's not as though you're a doctor. It is incredible to me when people talk about qualifications in the journalistic world. Oh, you went to J school. You know what J school is?
J school for the vast majority of people is you sit through a bunch of classes where they don't teach you anything to do with journalism. They teach you a bunch of thematic narrative stuff. And then what are the things you have to learn in J school that make you a journalist? This is why I don't describe people typically as journalists.
I say that they do acts of journalism because you have a normal person who does an act of journalism. The idea that journalism is a job for which you require a license or a qualification is ridiculous. There are very few jobs where qualifications actually matter, like heart surgeon. That's one where a qualification matters.
Scott Pelley standing on his qualifications while Barry Weiss, who is an editor at The New York Times, Before she started the free press, one of the most successful independent journalistic endeavors in America. And somehow she has no qualifications. But Scott Pelley, who reads stuff from a teleprompter on camera, that he is captain qualifications is absurd.
He says she has no qualifications for her job. You have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she's made at the evening news have been catastrophic. So why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better? Well, Bilton tried to be nice. He said, I will show you that's what I have to say. That's my plan over the next two weeks. I'll be meeting with everyone.
I'm very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included. My only regret here is that Bilton didn't respond with, show yourself out. The door is that away. Already coming up, Nick Bilton terminated Scott Pelley. It's very enjoyable. His letter is very enjoyable. You're going to want to hear it. First, June marks the first days of summer. That means that I have a full schedule.
I mean, I have a baby due like Any day now. We've got a lot going on in the house. We have America 250. We have to be taking care of the kids because the kids don't have school. What I do not have time for is waiting through a bunch of confusing insurance websites trying to figure out if I'm getting a good deal. And that's where Policy Genius comes in. Here's the reality.
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Chapter 6: How are recent election results impacting the Democratic Party?
Well, apparently. Pelley then responded. He said, Mr. Pelley, this is the New York Times. Mr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening, shortly after he was fired, said he had devoted decades of his life to 60 Minutes, which he said he still cared about deeply. I have been in combat in Afghanistan, Mr. Pelley said. I've been in combat in Iraq.
I've been in a war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broad. Oh, man. Wow. Give him a medal. Hero time. You mean the reporter went to the war zone because he reports on wars? Whoa. Wow. I guess he's basically like a veteran. We should give him a purple heart or something. Maybe he should be buried at Arlington when he goes.
Honestly, he needs to grow extra arms to pat himself on the back that hard. He's going to break his back from patting himself on the back that hard. Then he put out a full statement, quote, there has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes. The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history.
For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. Actually, we can count them. It turns out they have ratings. This spring, at the end of our 58th season, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.
60 has been the number one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Ah, the values your audience expects.
That's the big one right there. What are the values he's talking about? Is it journalistic integrity, as we will talk about in a moment? No, it is not. The values that the audience expects, according to Scott Pelley, left-wing aligned values. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.
The waste is heartbreaking. Last month, says Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Cruel, cruel. The highly paid members of the CBS News staff have to go find other jobs, which they will. Oh, the heartbreaks.
Oh.
Can we send money to the families? I mean, really? Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. Silence. I'm getting a little tired of hearing from people in America that if you lose your job, you are somehow silenced. I feel like he's not so silent. The conflation of getting fired with First Amendment type censorship is stupid. It's dumb. It was always dumb.
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Chapter 7: What does the future hold for the Democratic Party's direction?
Head on over to carshield.com slash Shapiro. Use code Shapiro now for 20% off. This is a historic Gallup poll showing what Americans of each party feel about their own party. What you see here is that traditionally speaking, Democrats are very warm toward their own party. Very, very warm toward their own party.
So if you look at this Republican line, which is percentage of Republicans, the favorable opinion of the Republican party, it varies between say 63% in 2009 up to a high in 2021. of some 95%. Right now it's at 91% because of course Trump is winning. But the blue line is almost always above the red line. That blue line for Democrats never from 2008 onward sinks below the mid 80s for Democrats.
For Republicans, it's routinely in the low 70s, sometimes even the high 60s. For Democrats, their traditional party approval is very, very high. Why is that? The reason is because Democrats see the Democratic Party as an action committee for power. Democrats want the Democratic Party to do things, right?
If you're a member of the Democratic base, you want the Democratic Party to make more legislation, to tax more, to spend more, to regulate more, to do things. And so Democrats might be disappointed that the Democratic Party isn't doing more stuff, but typically they get a lot of stuff that they want when Democrats are in power because Democrats ram through big things.
Republicans traditionally don't like the Republican Party nearly as much because it is harder to be a Republican legislator than a Democratic legislator. Democrats have virtually no limits on the stuff that they are willing to pass and ram into law. That is their job. That is what they are there to do. Republicans are there to stop government overreach And then roll things back.
That's a much harder job. Stopping and rolling back when it comes to growth of government is very, very difficult. Expanding government is super easy. And so Democrats are traditionally pretty happy with the Democratic Party. And Republicans traditionally are more dissatisfied with the Republican Party. That only lasts so long as Democrats win.
When Democrats start to lose power, the base starts to get antsy. Because then the base looks at the Democrats and they say, you're not doing the things we want. If you're not winning, then you can't tell us you're getting us 80% of the pie because there's no pie. And so the base starts demanding radical change. And that's what's happening right now.
There is a gigantic left-wing civil war that's taken place. The entire Democratic Party, by the way, has moved significantly to the left since the mid-2000s, way further to the left on pretty much every policy. Bill Clinton's platform in 1996 is unrecognizable as a Democratic platform today. If Bill Clinton were running for higher office today,
Using his platform in 1996, he would be considered a Susan Collins Republican. That is where he would be. That's how far left the Democratic Party has moved. But even with that Democratic Party move to the left, there's an even further splinter wing of the Democratic Party that's making strong moves. You can see all of this breaking out loose across the country.
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