I got teary-eyed a bunch of times in the past week over Scott Pelley, the CBS newsman, and the way he’s stood up for the venerable news magazine where he worked, 60 MInutes, and by extension his network, CBS (where Edward R. Murrow famously reported), and by extension American journalism, and by extension, American democracy. I’ve long admired Scott Pelley and his work. We also share the same journalism mentor, who died in 2004. I’ll get to that in a bit.
ICYMI, CBS (which is owned by corporate giant Paramount, which is mid-merger with Warner Bros Discovery), installed an inexperienced manager and primarily a culture warrior, Bari Weiss, as the head of its news unit. 60 Minutes is the crown jewel of CBS News. Weiss presided over the firings of the executive editor, the forced resignation of the previous executive editor, and the nonrenewal of contracts of nearly half of its correspondents.
Then she installed a new guy which a sketchy journalistic record, Nick Bilton, to go in there as the new executive editor. Scott Pelley confronted him in a meeting that lasted about 15 minutes. You don’t want to get into a gravitas match with Scott Pelley, with his broadcast baritone and his reputation as an unimpeachable straight up news man/silver fox. So the next day, he hamfistedly fired Pelley “for cause.” Now only two news correspondents and one sports guy, Jon Wertheim, remain at 60 Minutes, after this giant shitstorm from last week. Stacey Woelfel thinks we should all collective stop watching. Over the weekend, Pelley gave our friend Lulu at The NYT an interview and spoke candidly about how these incompetents now in charge put a thumb on the scale for Trump, and are ruining CBS News in a breathtaking way.
All of American history has been forged by folks daring to speak up and challenge the perceived order of things; that journalists do it is a given because it’s our primary job requirement. Pelley simply questioning his new boss in a meeting is the most obvious thing that he would do … and they fired him for it? Have they ever met Scott Pelley? He literally asks questions and challenges authority for a living.
“You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment ... there is no democracy without journalism.” — Scott Pelley
Moreover, CBS News was already centrist! This Defector piece gets into the details of how incompetent Weiss really was, when she meddled in the 60 Minutes piece after the ICE killings in Minnesota. The news organization was already going to show the context in in which Pretti and protestors weren’t entirely innocent in the fracas, but she pushed it too far. From Tom Ley at The Defector:
Journalists don’t bust a deadline.
Anyway. I got really teary-eyed reading Scott’s goodbye, and I couldn’t help but think of our shared mentor, Marty Haag, and what he’d make of all this. Marty Haag was the news director known for turning a local TV station, WFAA-TV in Dallas, into a national powerhouse. The station had international bureaus, even, because back then the local stations and national networks didn’t easily share content.
So many Capital J journalists came through that Marty personally hired and mentored; stars like Verne Lundquist, Paula Zahn, Russ Mitchell … and Scott Pelley. Marty had such an eye for talent and bull shit that he also fired Bill O’Reilly from that station, for being unethical (and probably for being an asshole). Having grown up in Dallas wanting to be a TV news reporter one day, WFAA is exactly where I wanted to work. The summer after I graduated from high school in 2000, I got a chance to intern at WFAA, alongside Marty Haag’s son Andrew. Marty had already been promoted up to the upper ranks of Belo, the corporation that owned the station, and was out of the newsroom for years by then. But Andrew and I became friendly and the two of us went to Philadelphia with the WFAA reporters to support the team at the Republican National Convention, the one where George W. Bush was formally nominated to be president.
After we got back, Andrew introduced me to his legendary Dad, and Marty and I began an email correspondence. I wish I knew which email account it was; the one with emails from Marty. He guided me as a pen pal as I went through college and through journalism school at Mizzou, where he was an alumnus. And when it was time to look for a job, I remember him coaching me to be so directed and intentional about it. He said, “Be targeted in your job hunt. Work for newsrooms with integrity because they will make you better. Don’t work at companies that don’t value journalism.”
He wrote on a post-it the specific stations for an entry level reporter where I should seek a job because those were the places that told stories with integrity, and whose corporate bosses had some values. He explicitly instructed me not to work for a Sinclair-owned broadcast station because of its lack of care for Capital J journalism and he wouldn’t want me to be steered the wrong way. (Sinclair in the Trump years has gone full on Trump propagandists, so Marty was not only right, he was prescient.)
Marty died of a stroke in early 2004, just months into my first reporting job out of college, at KWTX-TV in Waco. It’s a job I probably got because the news director there heard I was a protege of Marty’s. The love and tributes poured in. I spent two or three days hanging out at the Haag house with his sons and wife and Marty’s golden retrievers as loved ones came through to pay their respects. I told Susan, his wife, what a privilege it was to be Marty’s last protege in a long line of them. One of his earliest proteges was Scott Pelley. And when so many of us gathered at the WFAA offices that January to remember Marty, Scott flew in to sit around a conference room for hours, each of us telling Marty stories and remembering him with such love and reverence and humor. I remember the way Scott said Marty represented the best of us, and how much he’d shaped him and his values as a journalist to always be loyal to the truth, to never cut corners, to keep our heads down and work hard, to not let ego get in the way, to remember our duty is to inform the public so that it can make better decisions. I saw all of that when Pelley became the news last week. And in his goodbye letter, and in his postmortem interview that came out yesterday.
On Linked In, a former WFAA-er wrote of how Marty was instrumental in getting Scott placed at CBS News in the first place:
“Marty worked very hard with Scott to get Dan Rather to like him and pick him up for CBS . Scott really wanted it, and tried hard to meet Rather’s favor. Scott was damn near perfection as a reporter. WFAA was the gold standard in broadcast news. Every award you can think of. And Scott was Marty’s creation. That’s why it’s exceptionally sad but real for me that he had to stand up and say what’s happening to journalism and to CBS. But I’m sure Marty is very proud, smiling down from heaven.”
The former chairman of Belo Corp said that Marty Haag “personified journalism in the highest sense.” Last week and for forty years prior, we saw that it is also true of his acolyte, Scott. I texted Marty’s sons last week, saying I had been thinking about Marty a lot after Pelley stood up to the paper tigers. And they said they were certain that “Dad would be so so proud.”
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