CBS anchor Pelley vocal about president
NEW YORK — Softspoken yet direct, anchor Scott Pelley is emerging as a blunt evaluator of President Donald Trump on his “CBS Evening News” broadcast.
After Trump’s claim last month of underreported terrorist attacks, Pelley said on his newscast, “It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality.” He was just getting started.
“Some of the problems Mr. Trump promised to solve last night don’t actually exist,” he said on the broadcast after Trump addressed Congress.
“Today, the president had another Twitter tantrum,” he said on March 3, the day before Trump accused former President Barack Obama of ordering a wiretap against him.
Pelley, anchor of a nightly news summary steeped in tradition, reaches as many as 8 million viewers a night on a network particularly popular in the nation’s heartland — Trump country.
The one-liners set Pelley, 59, apart from rivals Lester Holt of NBC’s “Nightly News” and David Muir of ABC’s “World News Tonight.”
In a speech last year after winning an award named for Walter Cronkite, Pelley said that “charlatans” who publish or broadcast lies without regard for the values of journalism are one of the profession’s greatest threats.
Conservative media watchdogs see things differently, though. The Media Research Center has long viewed CBS as a liberal outlet. Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Obama, got a muchfriendlier reception on CBS, said the center’s Tim Graham.