Michael Shellenberger

CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship & Free Speech @UAustinOrg : Dao Journalism Winner : Time, "Hero of Environment" : Author, “Apocalypse Never,” "San Fransicko"

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

A 1990 law meant to protect Native American skeletons and sacred items has spiraled out of control, say anthropologists. Tribes are appropriating and burying non-indigenous items, including a Chinese vase, X-rays, and photographs. Now, the ransacking threatens medical science.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

@kevinnbass 🎯

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

Imagine spending your whole life becoming an academic expert. Then a random guy online tells you that you are wrong about your own field. And he's right. But you can never admit that. Because it would mean admitting that your life was a lie. That is the dilemma of many academics.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

In early 2024, the world-renowned American Museum of Natural History in New York City closed two major halls of Native American objects covering roughly 10,000 square feet. Its president wrote that the halls were “vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives, and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples.” Around the same time, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and others covered or removed Native American displays.

They did so to comply with legislation Congress passed in 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The goal of the legislation was to end more than a century of museums and collectors digging up and warehousing the Native American dead. For generations, private collectors, museums, and federal agencies had assembled collections of Native skeletons and grave goods taken during expeditions across tribal homelands.

NAGPRA required museums and agencies that take federal money to identify Native remains and cultural items and return them to lineal descendants and affiliated tribes. It was, by design, a compromise. Identifiable ancestors and genuine sacred objects would go home, while ancient or unaffiliated materials would stay available for research and public education.

But the law has spiraled wildly beyond its purpose, says anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss in a new podcast, and now reaches objects no one would call an ancestor. Consider a fragment of a Chinese bowl. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, catalogs a Ming dynasty porcelain bowl base fragment made in China around 1595. Its own record says the piece was presumed salvaged from the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Agustin, which sank off Point Reyes, California, in November 1595. The museum files this Chinese trade fragment under its Native California department and has hidden it away.

The law has even led anthropologists and curators to treat photographs and recent books as Native American artifacts. In a notice published in January 2026, the Fowler Museum at UCLA moved to repatriate photographic negatives of petroglyphs from Black Canyon in San Bernardino County. A separate notice that same month listed 146 objects that Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding would repatriate, among them Jaime de Angulo’s Indian Tales, a book the City of Redding bought for a museum reference library in 1981.

Weiss says the skeletal collections now disappearing are what train the people who read bones for a living, the forensic anthropologists who identify crime victims, and the anatomists who teach in medical schools. “There is a real danger,” she said, “that we’re going to lose some skills that are really essential to medicine, to forensics, and who knows what else.”...

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[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

A 1990 law meant to protect Native American skeletons and sacred items has spiraled out of control, say anthropologists. Tribes are appropriating and burying non-indigenous items, including a Chinese vase, X-rays, and photographs. Now, the ransacking threatens medical science.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

After being fired from CBS, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley yesterday said that “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified.”

Those are remarkable claims for which Pelley presented no evidence. Indeed, it would be extraordinary for CBS to demand such things of a correspondent, either verbally or in writing, given the reputational risk to the network.

A more likely explanation is that Pelley disagreed with someone at CBS and then declared a difference of opinion to be a demand to lie. Support for this interpretation comes from the fact that he claimed Tuesday that CBS’s new management, led by Bari Weiss, was trying to kill “60 Minutes,” something for which he also did not provide evidence.

Moreover, the accusation makes no sense. CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss took the job to rebuild CBS News, not to wreck it, and a ruined “60 Minutes” would hurt her. Paramount’s owners did not pay billions for the network to burn its best asset for spite. So the simpler reading is that Pelley is the one stretching the truth.

Doing so appears to be a habit for Pelley. He told The New York Times, “I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq,” but being in a combat zone as a journalist is not the same as being “in combat.” The remark is yet more evidence of Pelley’s propensity to exaggerate to the point of lying.

For decades, mainstream liberal journalists have displayed remarkable levels of arrogance, even as they get major stories wrong.

Consider the case of CBS News’ former anchor Dan Rather. In the fall of 2004, two months before the election, Rather presented documents purporting to show favoritism in George W. Bush’s National Guard service. Experts called them forgeries. CBS apologized: “We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry,” Rather said. On air, he added, “I want to say, personally and directly, I’m sorry.”

But then, a decade later, Rather told Variety he still stands “100 percent” behind the report and reframed the apology.

Or consider NBC’s Katie Couric. In her 2016 documentary “Under the Gun,” editors inserted roughly eight to nine seconds of silence after she asked Virginia gun owners how to keep guns from felons and terrorists without background checks, making them look stumped. The raw audio revealed that they answered immediately.

Couric’s first instinct was to defend what she did, saying she was “very proud of the film.” Only after sustained backlash did she apologize.

In her 2021 memoir “Going There,” Couric admitted she cut Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s harshest anthem-kneeling comments from her 2016 interview. Ginsburg had said kneeling players showed “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life, which they probably could not have lived in the places they came from.”

NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in the spring of 2020, aired a clip of Attorney General Bill Barr that omitted part of his answer, misleading the public.

When Catherine Herridge interviewed Barr for CBS Evening News, she asked what history would say about his decision to drop the case against a former National Security Advisor to President Trump, Michael Flynn. The Obama administration’s FBI had illegally targeted Flynn for entrapment and prosecution. Barr replied that ”history is written by the winner. So it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”

"Meet the Press'" anchor at the time, Chuck Todd, said on air that Barr “didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job.’” But “Meet the Press” had left out the second part of Barr’s answer to Herridge, in which he said, “But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law.”

The safeguards the journalism profession built against error did not work when it mattered. The corrections, the editors, the fact-checkers, and the standards desks all sat in place while the press got the border, trans medicine, climate, the sixth extinction, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, Covid and much else wrong. Gerth described how reporters sought to “shoot the messenger” rather than grapple with evidence contradicting the Russia collusion narrative...

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[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Scott Pelley says CBS demanded he "inject falsehoods," and wants to "murder" 60 Minutes. There's no evidence for either claim and good reason to think they're false. Pelley joins Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and Chuck Todd in spreading misinformation and then denying he had done so

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

👀

[J.D. Haltigan, PhD 🏒👨‍💻 @JDHaltigan]

Here was the hack Scott Pelley disgracing himself when interviewing @Moms4Liberty about the sexually explicit & degenerate Leftist books that they were heroically working to have removed from schools.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

CBS has fired “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley, and rightly so. He betrayed journalistic principles in platforming debunked science, in being closed-minded and dogmatic, and in behaving like a pompous ass. Good riddance.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

"60 Minutes" is the most prestigious TV news program in America. But a new review of the last 20 years of its reporting reveals serious inaccuracies and partisan bias on immigration, transgenderism, climate change, Covid, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and more.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

🎯

[ZitoSalena @ZitoSalena]

There are hundreds of journalists out there who have never risen to this level of arrogance in our profession; just doing their job, grinding it out every day, covering city councils & water authorities school boards & the cops beat.
None of them, including me, would ever consider this appropriate.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

@JoeConchaTV 💯

[ZitoSalena @ZitoSalena]

There are hundreds of journalists out there who have never risen to this level of arrogance in our profession; just doing their job, grinding it out every day, covering city councils & water authorities school boards & the cops beat.
None of them, including me, would ever consider this appropriate.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

@mazemoore 😂

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

@JaredEMoskowitz 😂

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

@KirFlem 🎯

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

I debunk Ehrlich’s vile lies over the decades here:

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

In 2020, "60 minutes" cut off Trump when he tried to say something true. CBS claimed, "we can't verify" the Hunter Biden laptop, a bald-faced lie.

On Sunday, "60 Minutes" let Paul Ehrlich make multiple false claims that not only can't be verified but can be debunked in minutes.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Scott Pelley platformed the debunked anti-human Malthusian catastrophist Paul Ehrlich who compared having children to dumping waste.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Ehrlich lied when he claimed we are in a 6th mass extinction and that it would take 5 Earths for the whole world to live at Western living standards.

@CBSNews @60Minutes represented Ehrlich's statements as scientific facts.

CBS should retract them.

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