By Becket Adams
Sunday, June 07, 2026
CBS News fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott
Pelley last week following alleged clashes with management.
The firing itself, like Pelley, wasn’t particularly
interesting.
It was the reaction that stood out.
Notable about the tantrum thrown by journalists and a
considerable number of elected Democrats was that it was part of a larger
conniption that has run uninterrupted since Bari Weiss took over as the
network’s editor in chief in October 2025.
“Scott Pelley told the truth,” ex-ABC News correspondent Terry
Moran, who was himself fired for unprofessionalism not too long ago,
claimed without evidence. “So, CBS News fired him.”
Speaking in reference to the recent editorial hirings and
firings at CBS, former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft said, “I think it has been disastrous for the
show, for the audience, which is not insubstantial.”
What this long-running “outrage” reveals, what with its
boilerplate rhetoric about oligarchies and its vague, specifics-free
allegations of wrongdoing by Weiss and 60 Minutes executive producer
Nick Bilton, is that a lot of people in the news business think of their
profession as something akin to a public university.
This upside-down view goes a long way toward explaining
how the credibility gap, the single greatest threat facing journalism today,
has gotten so wide.
Sloppy and one-sided reporting helped to crater trust, yes, but the industry’s move toward
total insularity, detachment, single-mindedness, and contemptible self-regard
makes the problem intractable.
Weiss is obviously trying to run CBS as a business, one
with broad appeal and plump profit margins. This means updating, adjusting, and
modernizing an organization whose workplace culture is still proudly stuck in the 1960s and where attempts at
change are resisted with invocations of an anchor whose final newscast was the
year John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan.
Running a successful newsroom today also means accounting
for the credibility crisis, which makes sense given that it is the most
pressing issue.
No one trusts us. This is a problem.
Without trust, there’s no audience; without an audience,
there’s no point.
How do you serve the public interest if you have no
public? For that matter, how can you afford to keep the lights on, let alone
afford to produce quality journalism, if there are no customers?
As obvious as this seems, there are those in the press
who view change, especially change that addresses the credibility problem, as a
threat to their comfort, their careers, and their preferred politics.
Oh, they’ll say their opposition is motivated by the
belief that the free press is too sacred to have to address matters as
pedestrian as “market forces” and “audience disapproval,” but the resistance is
rarely any deeper than professional self-preservation, fighting for perks and
good salaries, and for the freedom to indulge their partisan preferences in
subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
We see this in the Pelleys and the NPRs of the world and
their supporters in media — those who’d like to enjoy all the benefits and
prestige of major league journalism with none of the market pressures or
business concerns, and certainly none of the personal moderation required by
such things.
They often condemn efforts to impose accountability,
adjust editorial positions, account for opposing perspectives held by the other
50 percent of the country, or address ideological blind spots as attacks on the
First Amendment and editorial independence.
They’ve become so accustomed to a version of the news
industry that operates like a public university — where revenues are
unconnected to performance, where a captive audience is a given, where
viewpoint conformity is ruthlessly enforced, where loyalty is rewarded with
lifetime employment, and where criticism is worthy of attention only if it
comes from within the institution — that even the suggestion of operating under
a for-profit business model has them breaking out in hives and leaking to
competing newsrooms.
The irony is that the public university–style approach to
journalism is how CBS arrived at its current predicament.
Like many legacy newsrooms, CBS has taken its audience
for granted, viewing them not just as an afterthought but as something of a
nuisance. Unfortunately for the legacy league, this attitude is no great
secret. Audiences are keenly aware of the press’s dismissiveness, especially
when it comes to legitimate concerns and criticisms, worsening the already
serious credibility crisis.
There’s a reason an astonishing 94 percent of U.S. news
consumers believe it is important for “people to do their own research to check
the accuracy of the news they get,” according to recent Pew Research Center data.
This skepticism did not appear overnight.
It is a direct result of how the industry has operated
over the past 50-some years.
So now newsrooms such as CBS have new, younger talent who
recognize the crisis and are asking questions such as: “What can we do
differently to appeal to the widest number of viewers?” and “How do we win back
trust?”
But rather than answer these questions, CBS’s longtime
staffers mount a months-long internal revolt, complete with leaks from staffers
upset that anyone would dare to ask them what they do during work hours.
Pelley’s firing is just a microcosm of a larger and more
exciting story playing out in media, where the legacy brands — those gargantuan
dinosaur models and networks — have yet to concede that their ideal of modern
journalism has very little in common with reality.
Whether the old guard likes it or not, our news media are
in a transitional phase, driven by technological change and exacerbated by
audience distrust (a feeling that increasingly appears to be mutual). Old
assumptions about how the business works no longer hold.
Remember: Bill O’Reilly hosted the top-rated show on Fox
News for two decades, earning as much as $25 million annually. Then, in 2017,
he was replaced overnight by Tucker Carlson, who delivered comparable ratings
for significantly less money.
Everything is up for grabs. Everyone is replaceable.
The savvy journalist understands this.
The same apparently can’t be said of Pelley, who cut his
teeth in journalism in an era that predates the invention of the Post-it note.
This isn’t a gratuitous dig. Pelley is 68 years old. He
was born the year the Soviets hurled Sputnik into the stratosphere. In
contrast, Weiss is 42 and Bilton is 49. Forget Sputnik. Three of the four Space
Race presidents were already dead by the time they were born.
Moreover, the average age in the 60 Minutes audience
is 65, which is not ideal for the show’s long-term prospects.
If you don’t think the age gap and audience demographics
played a role in Pelley getting the heave-ho, you’re fooling yourself. It has
played out exactly thus in newsrooms across the country, with the possible
difference being that Pelley’s purported unprofessionalism likely made
management’s decision easier than most.
When you hack your way through all the self-glorifying
language about “our democracy” and the sacredness of journalism, you’ll find at
the bottom of everything that this is a business.
Pelley and his entourage of apparent superfans in the
House and Senate Democratic caucuses may not like it, but it’s true, and a
business isn’t like a public university.
This is the private sector. They expect
results.
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