’60 Minutes’ program on Lebanon pager attack was nothing more than Israeli propaganda

The storm of criticism that immediately followed the disgusting “60 Minutes” December 22 televised report about Israel’s “pager attack” in Lebanon arguably missed the awful report’s broader and more concealed impact. First, and most obviously, Lesley Stahl’s 13:34 feature was squarely in the long mainstream U.S. media tradition of glorifying the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. She opened her report by calling the attack “one of the most daring and sophisticated deceptions in the history of counter-intelligence.” Critics rightly jumped all over this kind of obnoxious gushing, which she repeated during the rest of the report.

But the 60 Minutes report had an even larger impact, which Stahl and her producers probably didn’t even recognize. Her only sources were “two recently retired Mossad agents,” their identities melodramatically concealed with masks and altered voices. Stahl sat there, entranced, as the two asserted — without contradiction — that Mossad had taken extraordinary measures to calibrate the amount of explosives to insure that the devices would only hurt the targets, not the people near them. One of the ex-agents claimed that the thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies were carefully aimed only at “Hezbollah terrorists.”  At 4:48 for instance, one of the agents tells her, “If he push the button, the only one who will get injured is the terrorist himself. If his wife or his daughter will be just next to him, he’s the only one that will be harmed.”

This angle was key to the larger Israeli propaganda strategy, which 60 Minutes played along with, either deliberately or because it was duped. Here it is: 

1. Assert that Israel took enormous care not to hurt civilians with the exploding pagers.
2. Therefore, implicitly assert that Israel also has been careful during its attack on Gaza, and more recently against Lebanon. In short, when the Israeli air force drops huge bombs on Gaza hospitals, you can believe their claims that they are aiming at Hamas “terrorists,” and doing all they can to avoid harming innocent health workers and patients.

Of course, no one who follows the conflict at all closely, especially since October 7, 2023, will fall for any of this dishonesty. But 60 Minutes is a legendary CBS network program that dates back to 1968, and still averages more than 10 million viewers every Sunday evening. Not many in its audience are likely to also watch Al Jazeera, or visit this site, where they would encounter alternate views.

Lesley Stahl failed to challenge the Israeli narrative. In the end, the exploding devices killed 37 people, including at least two children, and injured an astonishing 3,000. 60 Minutes calls itself a news program, but it made no effort whatsoever to interview any of those 3,000 injured Lebanese, many of whom surely lost hands and eyes, to at least hear their side of the story. 

Nor did she even mention international law. Just after the September pager explosions, Human Rights Watch said clearly that “such attacks violate the laws of war.” The organization explained:

“. . . setting off simultaneous explosions in thousands of personal devices without knowing where they are and who they are with runs the same risks as bombing from the skies without looking: other people, innocent people, civilians, including children, may be around.”

The 60 Minutes producers must have misplaced Human Rights Watch’s phone number. 

60 Minutes has not always acted as a propaganda arm for Israel. Once, a brave reporter named Bob Simon worked there. Simon on a number of occasions challenged Israel’s version of events, and in one memorable case, he even argued during an interview with Israel’s then-ambassador, Michael Oren. Simon was tragically killed in an auto accident in 2015, and this site paid tribute to his honesty then. Is it too much to ask 60 Minutes to find a successor to him?