JOURN BURN!
"CBS News is on fire," says Scott Pelley. The latest journalism crisis.
Yes, we’ve been over this. Media bias.
A new twist this time:
Conservatives: Liberal journalists are tilting the news to the Left!
Scott Pelley: Our conservative news boss is trying to tilt it to the Right!
Or, to use his metaphor: it’s about his new boss’s shady THUMB.
There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.
Or so Pelley told the New York Times after his stunning firing by CBS.
So we’re talking again about: what journalism is, and what journalists’ independence is. And why you should care.
Praise for Pelley — from the same CBS News that fired him!
Oddly enough (in my opinion), the firing of Pelley — for what the new Executive Producer of 60 Minutes called a “performative display of hostility” in the June 1 staff meeting where Pelley slammed his new bosses — was followed on the CBS Evening News by the kind of laudatory retrospective piece you might see after a notable person dies.
And after that piece (clip below) aired, anchor Tony Dokoupil said, slowly and reverentially, “Well, Scott. From all of us: Thank you.”
As if Pelley had just had his jersey retired and raised to the rafters, not that he had just been turned out to pasture. (Sorry about the metaphor-mixing.)
I guess there is still some journalistic independence at the CBS News shop, since the flagship newscast was allowed to extol Pelley after he was shown the door.
We’ve got a mess on our hands
What is going on? Well, we’re in the wrenching process of figuring out for ourselves, again, what journalism is, and what it’s for.
Terry Moran, the former-network-reporter-now-Substacker, who knows a thing or two about being fired over biting comments, sums up, for me, the crux of the matter. In a video this week, Moran refers to the “wall” that’s supposed to exist between corporate media owners and their newsrooms.
Well, [that wall] doesn't exist anymore at CBS News. And it's a question, how long can it exist anywhere else? (from Moran video, 6-3-26)
This is the claim Pelley and other fired 60 Minutes personnel are making: that CBS — now under the direction of new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — is trying to make nice with President Trump because the administration’s approval is needed for CBS’s parent company, Paramount, to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Trump doesn’t like how CBS News reports the news. Listen, Mr. Paramount, if you don’t rein in your kid and his “reporting,” I might not look favorably on your big deal.
What journalists do
I’m not going to rehash all of the CBS/Paramount/Ellison/Bari Weiss stuff here. (There are helpful summaries out there, like this one from one of my former employers, the AP.) I just want to point out what Moran is pointing to, i.e., that journalists exist to describe, for the people, and analyze, for the people, what is happening in the halls of power, irrespective of what the powerful think about it, and free from the influence of the powerful on the journalists’ corporate bosses.
Journalists are to be independent, and to pursue truth, and to ask hard questions, and to probe and challenge, and to give context, and to explain ramifications — no matter what the subjects of the reporting have to say, and no matter what strings they might try to pull. Journalists exist to serve the readers and viewers, not the powerful.
In other words: the owners should let the reporters do their thing. You know, that wall Moran refers to.
Easier said than done, of course. I get it. The owners have to pay the bills. They have to stay in the good graces of the advertisers and of society’s power players. Sometimes the journalists, working for those owners, report on those advertisers and and on those power players. There’s a tension in the building. “Upstairs” vs. the Newsroom.
My own experience
I was fortunate enough, in my last 36 years in journalism, to work for station owners who were aware of that tension, but who tried to honor that wall we’re talking about. Rarely did we sense that management wanted a certain story spiked, or told in a certain way, to suit the station’s business interests. Our independence was honored.
More often, there was some nudging from upstairs to be sure we were being even-handed politically and ideologically. When CNN — one of our main providers of national and world news — was thought to be leaning a little too hard against Trump, management leaned on us to scrutinize every story for balance and to make edits as necessary. That’s a good thing. But again, there’s a tension.
As I’ve discussed with you before (for example, here and here and here), many of my conservative friends who consume mainly Fox News (for better or for worse — for worse, in my view) would say, good on WFMZ for spotting CNN’s bias, and would no doubt say, good on Bari Weiss for un-tilting CBS News from the Left and tilting it back toward the center.
Well. I won’t repeat my mantras here about journalism having a liberal tilt because it’s liberals who go into journalism, nor will I try, again, to show that Fox News and other right-leaning media are arguably worse because they don’t just tilt to the Right — they tend to mislead, distort, leave mistakes uncorrected, and just plain report falsehoods. I’ve covered that ground. (See the links above.)
I’ll just say:
Better truths from somebody on the Other Team than falsehoods from someone on Your Team. Better solid journalism from the Liberal Media than specious journalism from the Conservative Media. And I say that as a conservative (mainly).
Pelley did not just decry the removal of “the wall” at CBS — where management’s business interests allegedly Trump the work of the news department — but he also claimed he was instructed to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” How so? He said Weiss wanted a 60 Minutes piece to make the anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis “look more violent,” and to describe Renee Good’s car as “driving toward the officer” who shot her, when the video showed different. (CBS News, in reply, says Weiss made suggestions to make the piece stronger, and that her points “had no political motivation.”)
If Pelley is telling the truth, this is pretty damning.
From Scott Pelley…to James Madison
Let’s give media expert Founding Father James Madison the last word.
Pre-Revolution, newspapers in the Colonies couldn’t criticize the king. Their “journalism” had to be pro-king. I’m sure President Trump would…. oh, never mind.
In an early draft of the First Amendment, Madison wrote,
…the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.
The language was later changed; the thought remained.
Madison knew that if the press was only allowed to report what the authorities liked to hear, it would not actually be serving as a “great bulwark of liberty.” He argued before the U.S. House that “the censorial power is in the people over the Government, not in the Government over the people.” What does that mean?
Writing at the moderate-Republican Ripon Forum about the Trump administration’s treatment of journalists — under the title, “James Madison would be appalled” — Katie Fallow and Jake Karr explain what Madison meant:
When the government provides access only to favored reporters, or only if reporting conforms to the government’s chosen narratives, it exercises a “censorial power” over the press that poisons our information ecosystem and inhibits effective self-government.
Amen to that.
Excellent analysis.
Thank you Rob. You are a brilliant and thoughtful man. This is so carefully written and so true to your beliefs as a journalist. I truly appreciate you and the work you put into this. Please keep it coming. As you know, it’s so important.