Press martyrdom and the state of legacy media

CBS News fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley last week following alleged clashes with management.

Like Pelley, the firing itself wasn’t particularly interesting.

It was the reaction that stood out.

Most notable about the conniption thrown by journalists and a considerable number of elected Democrats was that it was the latest in a larger tantrum that has run uninterrupted since October 2025, when a lesbian Obama-Democrat, Bari Weiss, took over as the network’s editor-in-chief.

“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 many people in the news business view their profession as something akin to a public university.

They don’t think of themselves as beholden to public opinion, market demands, or even basic workplace professionalism. Rather, they see themselves as a necessary pillar of civilized society, and you all could be a little more grateful for their service.

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 problem has also been aided enormously by the industry’s move toward contemptible insularity, detachment, single-mindedness, and total self-regard.

Weiss is obviously trying to run CBS as a business, one with broad appeal and thick profit margins. This means updating, adjusting, and modernizing an organization whose workplace culture is still proudly stuck in the 1960s.

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. Naturally, 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, like public educators, view change, especially change in response to industry-wide failures, as a threat to their comfort, their careers, and their preferred politics.

Oh, they’ll say their opposition is motivated by the sincere belief that the free press is too sacred to have to address matters as pedestrian as “market forces” and “audience disapproval,” but their resistance is rarely any deeper than professional self-preservation; they’re fighting for perks, good salaries, and 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 — 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 such things require.

They recoil at efforts to impose accountability or any suggestion that they give fair consideration to opposing perspectives held by the other 50 percent of the country, crying about the sanctity of 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.

But a news network is answerable to more than a board of trustees, and it’s an irony 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 corporate media, this attitude is no great secret. Audiences are keenly aware of the press’s dismissiveness, especially when it comes to viewer 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 that organizations such as CBS have new, younger management who recognize the credibility crisis, longtime staffers are being asked 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 entrenched veterans have mounted 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 story playing out in media, where legacy brands — those gargantuan dinosaur networks — have yet to recognize or 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.