Bending the Knee

When I heard that Scott Pelley had been fired from CBS News, I thought about the first time we met.

Oklahoma City, April, 1995. The Murrah Federal Building was still smoldering. The dead—168 of them—were still being recovered out of the rubble after the bombing of the building by Timothy McVeigh, a right-wing domestic terrorist.

The heat was relentless. The sun hammered down on the scene. The smell was indescribable. The place was crowded with people—first responders, loved ones still in shock yet still hoping, police and investigators, TV crews.

There were a lot of reporters there, I remember. Some were focused on the live shot, the standup, the next hit. Busying themselves with angles and lighting. That’s part of the job. Pelley was quieter, focused on the first responders, absorbing the atmosphere of that particular moment, the terrible weight of a scene where children had been killed and a community was trying to hold itself together in the heat and the horror.

I thought: That’s a reporter. That’s what it looks like when somebody is actually doing the job.

We talked a bit over the next couple of days. I was still at Court TV; Scott was in the CBS Dallas bureau. I’ve never told him this over the years, in those infrequent times we’d meet at events and say a few words, but—I learned so much from Scott in Oklahoma City.

Thirty years later, he's still that reporter.

On June 1st, Scott Pelley stood in front of his colleagues at 60 Minutes and said what he believed to be true: that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is murdering the program. He said it knowing what would happen. They fired him the next day.

This is not about insubordination. Journalists argue about their work constantly—in edit bays, in story meetings, in the hallway, over email at midnight. That argument is the lifeblood and the joy of any healthy newsroom. Confident management engages with it, pushes back, wins some and loses some, and is better for it.

What Scott Pelley did—standing up in a staff meeting and saying the place is being destroyed—is what reporters always do when they believe something important is at stake. You can disagree with his tone. But you cannot honestly claim that he was doing anything other than fighting for the journalism.

And this is not about a failing program. 60 Minutes is not broken. It is not hemorrhaging viewers and declining into cultural irrelevance. In a fragmented media environment, 60 Minutes has an enviable prominence. Any other program, podcast, publication or creator would love to have 60’s impact.

Could the program be fleeter in new media spaces? Sure—but it isn't absent from them. Wherever 60 Minutes shares its journalism, it gets eyeballs and engagements, because the journalism is great. The first rule of management applies here with unusual force: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The overhaul of 60 Minutes under Bari Weiss is not a response to failure. It is something else entirely.

It is not about the future of the format. After decades at the helm of the program, Executive Producer Bill Owens resigned last year, citing concerns about journalistic independence under the new management. Anderson Cooper left after nearly two decades. Sharyn Alfonsi is gone. Cecilia Vega is gone. And now Pelley—fired for saying plainly what the facts of the exodus have been saying quietly. This is not a changing of the generational guard. This is a purge.

The job of a journalist is to open your eyes, see the thing that is in front of you—and call it by its proper name.

So let’s do that, because Scott Pelley deserves that decency: CBS News is bending the knee to Donald Trump.

Paramount, CBS's parent company, is seeking federal approval for a merger. Its new owner, David Ellison—son of Trump ally Larry Ellison—has assiduously sought a close relationship with the Trump administration. When Trump sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris—a suit that legal experts called frivolous—Paramount settled rather than fight it. Not because they thought they'd lose. Because they calculated that winning wasn't worth the cost of the relationship.

That calculation is now the editorial policy of CBS News.

And that is what is being imposed on 60 Minutes. A corporate agenda that they are dressing up in the language of change. And when Scott Pelley stood up and named it— not to the press, not on social media, but to his colleagues in a staff meeting—they fired him for it. That sends a message to every journalist left in the building, and each and every one of them knows it: the work is not just the work anymore.

For months, the accommodation of power by American media institutions has been happening mostly behind the scenes. I’ve heard firsthand about it. Subtle editorial adjustments, stories that didn't get assigned, the kind of pressure that any journalist who has worked inside a large news organization knows well. You feel it before you can name it.

Scott Pelley named it. Out loud, in public, at professional cost.

That is clarifying. When someone stands up and says what is actually happening, we can see the choice clearly. We can see the actual fork in the road: journalism that serves its audience, or journalism that serves its owner's business interests.

And that clarity, as painful as it is, forces all of us—all of us—to ask:

Can journalism survive inside corporate structures where the corporation is making its these kinds of accommodations with power?

Scott Pelley is out of that building now, which means he is free. And the journalism that needs doing right now—without a corporate parent, without a merger to protect, without an administration to appease—is exactly the journalism that independent reporters and independent newsrooms exist to do.

This is a hard moment for American journalism. But it is also clarifying, even uplifting.

We know what we're here for.

—Terry