By Noah Rothman
Friday, June 05, 2025
You can tell that the press is struggling to find a
rationale to justify its instinct to rally around former CBS News anchor Scott
Pelley. The Associated Press, for example, made a valiant but failed
attempt.
“As if Scott Pelley’s years in a glamorous,
globetrotting, seven-figure dream job weren’t enough, he’s pulled off one more
thing to stir your envy,” the AP’s lead read, “a cutting takedown of his boss
that went loudly public.”
That’s right. According to the AP’s carefully curated
sources, telling your boss to take this job and shove it is the essence of the
American dream. The outlet quoted a variety of mid-level professionals who
either dream about blowing up their careers or have done just that and managed
to land on their feet. Surely, this one is a feel-good story for AP readers who
hate their jobs — a cohort that seems likely to include a fair number of AP
reporters.
The effort to retroactively condition the AP’s readers
into believing that the prodigious tantrum in which Pelley engaged (and which his
allies thought we
all needed to know about) into something righteous is complicated by an
elementary familiarity with the concept of at-will employment.
If your boss believes that you’ve made a performative
spectacle of yourself in order to publicly “ambush” corporate leadership and
then reject the many opportunities you’re offered to get with the program as
envisioned by your superiors, you’re liable to find yourself on the
unemployment line.
Progressives, including the AP, stress that the
progressive left is merely protecting “a revered cornerstone of TV journalism”
from adulteration by neophytes with no appreciation for the product or
understanding of the business of TV journalism. That’s hard to believe, not
just because both Bari Weiss and her choice to executive produce “60 Minutes,”
Nick Bilton, do have extensive experience in media. It’s a stretch
because those who are making the biggest stink about Pelley’s alleged ordeal
are not at all deferential to institutions merely because they’ve been
around for a long time.
The Supreme Court has had nine justices for a long time,
but the left does not regard that as a status quo that must be preserved.
Rather, they see that as a problem to be fixed. The same could be said of the
Electoral College. That’s been around for a while, too, but its critics don’t
care. Abolishing the Senate, a constitutionally dubious proposition that
nevertheless has a cheering section on the left, is not the sort of thing you’d
see anyone with a proper reverence for the old and storied demand.
It’s not hard to understand why the AP would attempt to
enlist the broader public in Pelley’s struggle. It is hard to see why
they thought their audience would see shades of themselves in an extremely
well-compensated television host who engaged in public display of contemptuous
insubordination toward his employer with the goal of forcing them to terminate
his contract.
No comments:
Post a Comment