TV News in the United States once was king. The king is dead. Long live TikTok. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has finally arrived with the destruction of credible television journalism - threatening both news and democracy.
This article by Global Geneva's America's editor was first published as part of William Dowell's Substack column A Different Place.
At a quick glance, Scott Pelley’s claim that he was surprised at being fired by CBS might seem a bit naive.
In case anyone missed the fracas at CBS News, Pelley, a 37-year veteran at CBS and the lead correspondent at CBS’s star news show, 60 Minutes, exploded at the show’s newly appointed producer, Nick Bilton, and CBS News’ controversial, recently appointed news director, Bari Weiss. Pelley accused Weiss of trying to kill the show and Bilton of having slender qualifications to replace the show’s producers who had just been fired. Neither Weiss nor Bilton had any previous experience in TV news.
Weiss’ argument is that despite the fact that 60 Minutes had increased its last season’s audience by an astonishing 9%, it was failing to keep up with journalism’s rapidly changing ecosphere. In short, social media, notably X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and other online media, are reshaping how the country relates to news, and 60 Minutes was, in Weiss’ mind, beginning to look like a has-been.
To the average viewer, Pelley’s astonishment at being fired might seem a bit over the top. He is 68. The normal retirement age is 65. His net worth is estimated at more than $18 million. With his celebrity status, he is still quite employable. In the current climate, that is not the case for most Americans.
Pelley made it clear that he definitely thinks both his immediate bosses should be fired. During a period when I worked at NBC News, I had similar feelings about NBC’s European News Director, who had been nicknamed “Genghis Cohen, the Destroyer from the East” because he had ruined so many careers.
At an introductory briefing, he casually explained that foreign correspondents didn’t need to speak the language where they were posted, since the network was going to tell them what to say anyway. I dismissed him with a few unmentionable words as a complete moron, which he was. I remember his response. “We like people who like us,” he said. “People who don’t like us, we get rid of.”
I went off to Morocco for a month. Came back and got a job with a different network. That’s the way broadcast journalism usually works.
The news business is not for the faint of heart. The standard advice to anyone entering the field used to be, “If you can’t stand the heat, don’t go in the kitchen.” A former TIME executive offered sound advice: “Don’t fall in love with the company; it can’t afford to love you back.”
Over the years, my feelings about journalism evolved. If you haven’t been fired at least once, I eventually concluded, it probably means that you are not doing your job. For a long time, Pelley was an exception in an industry prone to fast turnovers.
Looked at from a different angle, however, Scott Pelley’s rage is easy for anyone who has covered the news in life-threatening situations to understand. Part of his anger is an expression of solidarity and commitment to the team that made ’60 Minutes’ a top investigative news show.
Although he began his career in 1989, well after the Vietnam War, he covered action in the Middle East and Afghanistan. When you are into that kind of reporting, each story involves putting your life on the line. The news is no longer something that you take lightly. Pelley notes that his former boss and producer, Bill Owen, had saved his life while covering a now forgotten combat. These are not colleagues that you easily forget or abandon.
To Barry Weiss, CBS employees may seem more like a question of numbers. To Pelley, each is a deeply felt connection to another human being that you would risk your life to protect.
Neither Bari Weiss nor Nick Bilton has the background to fully understand that, and they clearly don’t care. To them, news is a business; either it makes money, or you go somewhere else.
The competition is not about telling the truth that might discomfit the rich and famous, but instead about capturing eyeballs that can eventually be monetized.
As the crowd brought in by CBS’ new owners sees it, the public wants to be entertained, so instead of news, it makes sense to offer them ‘infotainement’: a goulash of ‘news you can use’ with a few intriguing tidbits about world events intended to give the aura of seriousness. The real objective on that score is to make everyone happy to be an American and safe at home.
America is not the only country to take this route. I had a friend in France who worked for one of the major TV channels and did a story about French railway workers rising early in the morning and breaking the ice in their kitchen sink so they could wash. The correspondent’s boss was furious and said, “You showed poverty. We don’t do that. At least not French poverty.”
Better to show poverty in the Third World so your viewers won’t complain about rising prices at home or the politicians who are living high off their tax dollars. In that scenario, who cares about the harsh conditions faced by a few railway workers?
CBS News used to be different. The network began when William Paley decided to advertise his family’s cigar stores on a struggling network of 16 radio stations headquartered in Philadelphia and calling itself the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. Paley’s cigar sales doubled within a year, and Paley subsequently gathered a group of investors and bought the network.
As the lead-up to World War II was unfolding in Europe, Paley dispatched Edward R. Murrow with orders to find talent willing to go on the air. Murrow hired the best, brightest, and most articulate reporters he could find, and then he became one himself. He fearlessly reported from rooftops during the London Blitz while Nazi bombers rained havoc down on the city. The men Murrow hired stayed with CBS News, and they turned the network into the gold standard for broadcast reporting.
As Scott Pelley discovered late in life, all good things come to an end. In a 1960 column, New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling pointed out that freedom of the press is really only guaranteed if you actually own one.
Vietnam and Watergate proved that the press has enormous power. That was an illusion. It didn’t take long for corporate America and a handful of wealthy billionaires to decide that if you want to escape media scrutiny, the best tactic is to buy up the media.
If you don’t want journalists to do their normal thing, or in the words of American humorist Finley Peter Dunne, “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable,” then hire journalists who won’t ask troubling questions or look too deeply into what is going on. Russia has used that tactic for a long time. Moscow has two major papers, Pravda (Truth) and Novosti (News).
The joke in Moscow is that there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Novosti. Both papers developed a reputation for engaging in the political equivalent of infotainment. Russia, of course, is a totalitarian oligarchy with some of the external trappings of a modern democracy, but run by a dictator who makes certain that everyone knows which lines not to cross. The U.S. is not there yet, but is stumbling in that direction.
The trouble with the entertainment-as-opposed-to-news approach is that the enormous power the media enjoys does not come from the individual journalists who do the reporting. It stems, instead, from the truth that is a product of journalistic reporting. In a way, journalists are stuck in the role of the child in the story about the emperor’s new clothes. Their job is to shout out the fact that the emperor is naked. Once they stop doing that, when they avoid the essential truths that really matter, they no longer serve a purpose, and the power they once had evaporates.
60 Minutes, under the guidance of Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton, may die a slow, agonizing death, but I am convinced that journalism will continue even without Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes, or CBS News.
The reason I think that goes back to exchanges that I’ve had with journalists in other countries. In Indonesia, the editor of the local equivalent of Time Magazine told me he had to deal with a hysterical reporter who had just received a cardboard box containing a human head.
The objective was clearly intimidation. The editor told the reporter not to worry. “I took the box and the head to the police station,” he said, and I told them, “I think this belongs to you.”
Later, I talked with a young woman who had been editing a newspaper in Kazakhstan and was in New York on a brief visit to the Journalism Department at NYU. We discussed the dangers of reporting in a totalitarian dictatorship.
“They didn’t like what I was writing,” the young woman told me. “So they cut off the head of a dog and nailed it to my door. It was a message.” That sounded pretty intimidating, and I asked her why she kept on working despite the evident danger. “It’s what I do,” she said.
Scott Pelley and 60 Minutes may be gone along with CBS News, but there are plenty of others out there who are more than ready to fill the gap. It’s who we are and what we do.
Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.
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