In a piece headlined “Where Was ’60 Minutes’ When Rust Belt Jobs Were Cut?” TownHall.com writer Salena Zito decries the weekly CBS newsmagazine’s focus on the workers laid off by convicted felon President Trump and drug-addicted billionaire Elon Musk’s ongoing destruction of the federal government at the alleged expense of media attention that Zito asserts should instead be directed at the millions of Rust Belters who have suffered so terribly over the last half-century.

“Sept 19 marked 47 years since thousands of workers, who were mainly men, did what they did every Monday in the valley. They walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River for the early shift. Within an hour of the workers’ shift, Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 of them in a single day. Within months, 16 more plants owned by US Steel shut down, including Youngstown-based Ohio Works. The company cited foreign imports, lack of profitability, aging facilities and the cost of growing government regulations on the industry to explain the move,” and blah blah blah, Zito writes, taking a while to get to the point.

“On a recent ’60 Minutes,’ Scott Pelley interviewed a woman named Kristina Drye, who lost her job during the US Agency for International Development shutdown,” Zito continues, quoting Drye telling Pelley “Twelve days ago, people knew where their next paycheck was coming from. They knew how they were going to pay for their kids’ day care, their medical bills. And then, all gone overnight.”

Zito doesn’t tiny violin Drye’s predicament so much as identify CBS News as the callous, indifferent villain here, saying they “clearly” don’t “understand is that this episode of ’60 Minutes’ showed it doesn’t have the same empathy for the millions of people in the private sector in the middle of the country who have experienced the same sharp gut punch of uncertainty,” and that “Rarely has a cameraman showed up to their homes to ask them to tell their stories. ’60 Minutes’ did not do a segment on the steel valley back then when people lost their jobs,” because the MSM is so biased.

Now set aside that Zito’s story doesn’t quote any of these “people” who were supposedly “rubbed the wrong way,” that she blithely credits Youngstown Sheet and Tube’s blaming “foreign imports, lack of profitability, aging facilities and the cost of growing government regulations on the industry to explain the move” rather than devote any space to complaining about these powerful industrial concerns destroying people’s livelihoods rather than their shareholders’ portfolios, and…

More than a thousand workers were laid off two years ago at an auto assembly plant in Belvidere, Illinois. Scott Pelley sits down with some of these laid off workers. Hear what they think about tariffs, Sunday. https://t.co/mEN4CWeXMW pic.twitter.com/slLchXSIgv

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 2, 2025

…that two fucking weeks before the February 16th segment on the federal employees 60 Minutes ran this, which kind of undermines the whole accusation of depraved indifference to Rust Belters.

You can skip all those sins here because deeply misleading narratives, hypocrisy, and grossly incompetent execution at both are nothing new in the world of right wing propaganda.

The whataboutery is nothing new either, but what this piece does is truly herald the return to form prophesied by another really fucking ridiculous TownHall.com piece back in December: You know that they know something’s a bad look when the MAGAverse starts cranking out this level of horseshit directed at the media for giving airtime to said bad look. That, rather than ignore the segment and write about some culture war shit, Zito felt compelled to make sure her audience didn’t get anywhere close to feeling sympathy for people on a news show they don’t watch.

Which could mean that it isn’t actually about 60 Minutes per se, but a larger sense of unease, steadily growing toward full-blown panic, over the backlash that the Trump Regime is beginning to face, with their loyal sycophants being faced with white-hot rage from constituents.