The self-appointed enforcers of "progressive" media indoctrination are satisfied that CBS hasn't yet changed the tone of "60 Minutes," which they call a "crown jewel" of the Dan Rather Network. Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute was pleased that Sunday's show still featured two "fair and factual" stories that criticized President Donald Trump.
That's not even counting the 13-minute puff piece by Jon Wertheim on radical feminist author Margaret Atwood, who the Left reveres for warning of right-wing Christian authoritarianism around the corner. The "60 Minutes" X account gushed: "Margaret Atwood, author of 64 books including 'The Handmaid's Tale,' has seen her work banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, and anti-Christian."
A "ban" in this case is normally in public school systems, not in wider society. You can find Atwood's craptastic books easily and hand them to your kids. A "ban" is not always a ban, either. The American Library Association admits most book challenges fail to remove books from classroom or library shelves completely. But any book that is challenged is considered a "banned" book.
This terminology allows the Left to celebrate the "brave" authors, as CBS did with its segment title: "The Indomitable Margaret Atwood." As in, "She's impossible to defeat."
Wertheim began his interview segment with a flourish: "You're an 85-year-old titan of literature, have been for a half-century now. You're Canada's best-known author, 64 books and counting. And increasingly, you find your work on lists of banned books, scrubbed from 135 American school districts."
This statistic on schools came from PEN America, a leftist lobbying group fighting conservative "challenges" to books. Earlier this year, they gave Atwood their "Eleanor Roosevelt Bravery in Literature Lifetime Achievement Award," which CBS failed to mention.
Here's the first thing we know about CBS: No one will be brave enough to read out loud the passages in Atwood's books that are too overtly sexual for 12-year-olds. Book "challengers" are always painted as silly and uptight. In "The Handmaid's Tale," there is forced intercourse, where a "commander" has sex with a "handmaid" in the presence of the "commander's" wife, which is all about systematic misogyny.
Atwood attacked school authorities in the Canadian province of Alberta as dunces: "The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? I don't know."
I couldn't find any document that said "indirect sex." The government of Alberta did distinguish between "explicit" and "non-explicit" sexual references. This isn't rocket science. Albertan officials singled out the graphic novel "Gender Queer," which includes the transgender protagonist envisioning having her imaginary penis in mid-fellatio, as well as talk of masturbation and blow jobs.
CBS was only interested in using the glamour of "book bans" to promote Atwood and, for the umpteenth time, find an authoritarian Christian conspiracy descending on America when abortion is no longer unlimited. Wertheim oozed: "With the ongoing rollback of reproductive rights and the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, 'The Handmaid's Tale' began, for many readers, to feel eerily prescient."
Other than Atwood having a new memoir to sell, there was nothing here that hasn't been said hundreds of times in leftist media. CBS and Wertheim certainly acted like eager handmaids to this literary "titan." But all the audience gets is another recitation of how Donald Trump's America can be "eerily" smeared as an authoritarian nightmare if women can't get a third-trimester abortion. If you consider that kind of television a "crown jewel," then you like propaganda, and not journalism.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.