Table of Contents
Tim Graham
Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.
Scott Pelley is most notorious in recent years as the willing facilitator of Joe Biden interviews. He gently guides the president through an interview like an usher takes to your seat. But that’s not what conservative activists get from Pelley. They get trashed as “extremists” hurting people with “hate speech.”
The subject on Sunday night was “book bans” in public schools, and the enemy du jour was Moms for Liberty, who threatens the ideological objectives of public-school teachers and librarians. As usual, the leftists are presented as non-ideological champions of knowledge, and the right-wingers are bumbling, evasive villains.
Here’s the top-of-show summary:
SCOTT PELLEY (voiceover): There were more than 3,000 book bans in public schools last year — 1,000 more than the year before. We went to one conservative southern town to hear how they’re turning the page.
DICK GEIER, Beaufort school board member: Parents have the right to determine what their children are taught and what they’re allowed to read. But what we’re having a problem with is parents that want to determine what other parents’ rights are for their children to read what they want.
This is the leftist boilerplate: Librarians get to pick the books, and conservatives aren’t allowed to tell “other parents” what to check out of the library.
Pelley trashed any protests: “A few activists, agitated by conspiracy theories, threatened librarians and board members, calling them “groomers,” extreme right-wing hate speech meant to brand opponents as molesters grooming children for sex.”
Later, Pelley underlined his point: “Critics of the book ban said they knew what “groomer” meant. And they saw it as a threat to people of colour and the LGBTQ community.”
Pelley described Moms for Liberty with the usual C-word: “Conservative, anti-teachers unions, Moms for Liberty is part of the pushback against the diversity and inclusion movement. ‘Moms’ supports new Florida laws that limit lessons on race and forbid lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity though high school.”
The political battleground is conservative vs. the “diversity and inclusion movement.” The hilarity is that the Left can’t handle diversity of opinions and hate any inclusion of a conservative counterpoint. But Pelley made it even worse: “Ultimately, Beaufort confronted fear and ignorance with civility and knowledge.”
As usual, CBS avoided any actual exploration of what content might be objectionable. Here’s how Pelley dismissed Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, as she tried to show him Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe:
Tiffany Justice read from sexually explicit books written for older teens, but found in a few lower schools. Most people wouldn’t want them in a lower school. But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.
It’s easier to mock a supposedly unfounded plot to sexualize children if you avoid discussing the graphic sexual images Justice is trying to show to CBS.
In the end, Pelley concludes with a quote from a “banned” book, which implies that it’s wrong to challenge librarians: “There are no wrong books. What`s wrong is the fear of them.” As usual, no one explored which books the librarians don’t select, like maybe “anti-trans” books or Mark Levin trashing the Democrats for hating America. That kind of “book ban” is just the natural order of things.
