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Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., finally announced what everyone expected, that she would not run for office again now that she’s 85. It’s the end of an era, an era of broadcast TV flattery and shamelessness. Pelosi has wielded great power over her members, and also great power over the national media. She viciously attacks any reporter that asks her a question she doesn’t want to answer. In recent years, the big networks have been putty in her hands.
This starts with the issue of her husband Paul’s aggressive financial trading, and her quiet opposition to any attempt to restrict members of Congress from trading stocks, which is on the agenda again. Back in 2011, CBS’s “60 Minutes” cooperated with conservative author Peter Schweizer when his book “Throw Them All Out” was published. Since then, the issue has largely vanished.
A New York Post analysis revealed that before first taking office in 1987, Pelosi and her husband reported between $610,000 and $785,000 in stocks in their portfolio — worth $133.7 million today, according to the latest estimates from Quiver Quantitative. That means that Nancy Pelosi grew her little nest egg by 16,930%.
In the last four years, the gush from the press has been remarkably excessive. Stock trading didn’t come up in 2022 in a George Stephanopoulos interview on ABC’s “This Week.” Stephanopoulos asked then-Speaker Pelosi: “the [Biden] White House is warning of an imminent invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians seem to think that’s all hype. Do you believe that Putin is poised to invade?” Stephanopoulos even asked Pelosi if “Congress [is] doing everything you can to prevent an invasion?” Most laughably, he asked her what “should President Putin know from you, the speaker of the House, about the consequences of invasion?”
FIVE TIMES NANCY PELOSI LOST HER COOL WITH THE MEDIA
When Democrats lost the House in the midterms, Pelosi relinquished her post as Democrat leader, but the encomiums never stopped. On CBS’s “Sunday Morning” in early 2024, substitute host Tracy Smith announced, “House Speaker Emerita that has a new book out, ‘The Art of Power’ — an art which Nancy Pelosi is something of a master.”
Pelosi also gushed, proclaiming President Joe Biden was at the “top of his game. Such a consequential president of the United States, a Mount Rushmore kind of president of the United States.” Lesley Stahl asked if she was serious: “Lincoln and Joe Biden?” Pelosi underlined it: “You got Teddy Roosevelt up there, and he’s wonderful. I don’t say take him down, but you can add Biden.”
Stahl just had to follow up that comedy with flattery: “If there were a Mount Rushmore for speakers of the House, Nancy Pelosi would certainly be up there, commemorating her 20 years as a commanding leader in Congress.” If there’s a stellar achievement on Pelosi’s résumé, it has to be how impressively she and her husband have enriched themselves while she was in “public service.”
NANCY PELOSI’S CRITICS CELEBRATE RETIREMENT ANNOUNCEMENT
Two weeks before the 2024 election, CNN and PBS host Christiane Amanpour read a virulently anti-Trump passage from Pelosi’s book. It was about his “repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events.” Then Amanpour asked: “How did you deal with that? And do you think this country, your country, can survive another term?” What would America do without Pelosi?
On the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot, “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt was a soft touch. He walked through the hallways of the Capitol with her and noted they “desecrated your office” and one rioter wrote he wanted to “shoot her in her freaking brain.” Pelosi said the memory “breaks your heart. It’s like somebody in the White House dropped a bomb on the Congress.”
Holt concluded with the devout Catholic angle: “You’ve been very vocal in the past about praying for your adversaries.” She said, “I always do,” but the current Republican Party “melted down into a cult.”
Perhaps the most servile interviewer was “PBS NewsHour” co-anchor Geoff Bennett, who interviewed Pelosi in front of a PBS crowd in California in May. He began by gushing to the crowd that Pelosi, who did the interview remotely from Boston, is “known for her political leadership, her sharp insights and her real singular ability to keep Democrats united.”
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Bizarrely, Bennett expressed shock that the Democrats weren’t getting credit for the economy: “Having covered Democratic policies, you can say objectively that Democrats did have policies that benefited the middle class! And Joe Biden spent a lot of political capital passing them into law and yet it didn’t seem to resonate, didn’t connect with the American people in this last election.”
Stahl just had to follow up that comedy with flattery: “If there were a Mount Rushmore for speakers of the House, Nancy Pelosi would certainly be up there, commemorating her 20 years as a commanding leader in Congress.”
Pelosi generously said the stupid voters shouldn’t be blamed: “When somebody doesn’t get a message, it’s not because of them. It’s because of us who are delivering the message, that we did not deliver it clearly enough.”
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This didn’t feel like a “newsmaker interview.” It felt like a journalistic version of “Driving Miss Daisy.”
No one should expect these broadcast networks to live up to the expectation that they’re “holding government accountable.” They have been easily brought to heel like they’re all Nancy Pelosi’s nervous caucus members.
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