When did 60 Minutes become Pravda?

Ages ago, when I was a young man, I used to watch 60 Minutes on Sunday nights. Then came 20 years of working weekends as an air traffic controller. But now I am once again watching 60 Minutes, and I am sad to say that you can't go home again.

In the olden days, 60 Minutes was famous for providing the best in hard-hitting investigative journalism. If you were a businessman back then, the last thing you wanted to see was a 60 Minutes camera crew waiting outside your office. Corporate executives used to whine that 60 Minutes was anti-business, but they had it wrong. 60 Minutes was anti-corrpution. Note that I used the past tense in that last sentence.

Things aren't the same any more. Last year, 60 Minutes did a puff-piece on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, paying homage to him for preventing the financial system from melting down. In a way, 60 Minutes was correct in that we were indeed on the edge of a global financial cataclysm. But Paulson was one of the perpetrators who caused the disaster in the first place. Yet 60 Minutes never mentioned that, and went on to lionize him for his efforts to avert disaster.

OK, maybe 60 Minutes could slip up once. After all, I have bad days once in a while, too. But then 60 Minutes went on to do a puff-piece on Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank of America, which had just finalized a deal to purchase Merrill Lynch. So there is 60 Minutes again, showing Bank of America as the clever bank that had avoided the pitfalls that snagged Citigroup and the other money center banks. And now BoA was going to acquire one of the venerable names of Wall Street.

Now the truth comes out. 1) Bank of America is only one or two steps behind Citigroup on the way to insolvency and bankruptcy, and 2) Merrill Lynch is a toxic mess, owning more worthless mortgage-backed securities than anyone had suspected. Certainly more than Ken Lewis suspected, and when he found out, he attempted to back out of the deal, invoking the "material adverse event" clause in the contract.

Here's where things REALLY get sticky. Henry the Hit-Man Paulson then told Lewis you will buy Merrill Lynch or I will fire you, your entire management team, and your board of directors. So Lewis said, "Where do I sign?" He bought Merrill Lynch, simultaneously saving his own job and throwing the BoA shareholders under the bus. Now Paulson pipes up that yes, he threatened to fire everyone, but only because Ben Bernanke ordered him to do so.

Well! That is certainly interesting, because Fed Chairman Bernanke has already denied through a spokesman that he did any such thing. You can bet that we have not heard the last of this. But that brings me back to 60 Minutes, which recently did yet another puff-piece on...Ben Bernanke! It was a wonderful story of how the smartest kid in town grew up to be the genius who is safeguarding our country's central bank.

More and more, 60 Minutes looks like Pravda, the old Soviet newspaper that told the people whatever the government wanted the people to know. It is one thing to try to imbue people with confidence that we will get through this economic mess and everything will be all right. It is quite another to praise the scoundrels who got us into this mess in the first place.

No one says 60 Minutes is anti-business any longer, and for that, the producers of 60 Minutes should be ashamed of themselves.