It should have been the final straw. The new power couple of editorial failure — Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton — had fired legendary 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley. Why? Because he dared to question the fact that CBS had installed sycophants in its top ranks. Instead of standing in solidarity, correspondents Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim declared in a joint memo to staff that they’d stay on to save the program. “We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die,” they said. The kids in Weekend at Bernie’s held a similar position.
The canary in the media coal mine isn’t just sick, it’s a charred skeleton.
The remaining trio of correspondents at 60 Minutes said they were “deeply upset” by recent firings, which you should read in the tone of Maine Sen. Susan Collins saying she’s “deeply concerned” about any given policy fuckery. The correspondents added: “Newsrooms are not supposed to be run like dictatorships.” Well, there’s something we can agree upon. A good newsroom should lift up its reporters on the good days, and defend them on the worst days. Anything else is cowardice and negligence.
A dictatorial newsroom is exactly what Pelley was protesting when he reportedly challenged management in a staff meeting and claimed that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was “murdering 60 Minutes.” Weiss has already proved herself to be a blight on journalism, so it was at least generous of her to let new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton steal some of that spotlight.
Bilton is probably best known for his book Hatching Twitter. He’s worked for The New York Times and Vanity Fair, and also as a screenwriter. Traditional broadcast journalism had never appeared on his resume until being recruited by Weiss for 60 Minutes. But that lack of experience can’t even explain the utter embarrassment of his now-public termination letter to Pelley.
You can’t walk into a room with a title and demand respect, but that’s exactly how Bilton is conducting himself. His missive to Pelley is so cloying and desperate that it made me feel secondhand embarrassment just reading it. He whines about decorum like a classic internet sealion while simultaneously looking like a huge dork — claiming to have been “ambushed” by Pelley with “remarkable incivility and contempt.” Bullshit. If you can’t show up to a newsroom prepared for hard questions from the journalists under your care, you have no fucking business being there.
The budding incompetence on the front lines at CBS is definitely a trickle-down situation. If Nick Bilton is a rotten egg, it’s because he ladders up to even bigger ones — like a matryoshka doll of failure whose final form is David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison and CEO of CBS parent Paramount Skydance. (Ellison reportedly signed off on Pelley’s firing.) This family is so bad it makes me wistful about the old-fashioned mendacity of the Murdochs.
Disclosure: James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch, just bought half of our parent company, Vox Media. Which brings me to the real point — we are in big, big trouble if media continues to be consolidated by an extremely small and powerful group of oligarchs. Especially when they cozy up to an administration that favors loyalty and patronage over things like free speech. ABC and Disney are fighting back, for now, but CBS has totally caved. There’s no good explanation for why the network canned Stephen Colbert, who is one of the kindest and most profitable people in television, unless you consider that his bosses are simply sucking up to Donald Trump. By the way, that’s a very stupid long-term strategy, but maybe these guys are only looking at how much loot they can get in next few years before this empire of incompetence crumbles. Or maybe they just want to get past the Warner Bros. acquisition.
Pelley didn’t mince words in a statement he posted after his firing. He claims the new owner of the network is squandering the legacy of 60 Minutes “apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.” Far more damning: Pelley says management instructed him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” and to “include assertions that are unverified.” Curiously, none of this is addressed in leadership’s memos to CBS staff.
This all comes as broadcast media is on life support nationwide. Even local channels are becoming creepy echo chambers for Trumpian propaganda, especially thanks to the Nexstar-Tegna deal — something that was enabled by an FCC that’s completely lost the plot. You know what’s even worse than corporate media consolidation? Government speech regulation. The FCC is now very happy to regulate speech as long as it’s meant to intimidate speakers who aren’t favored by the Trump administration.
Institutions like The Late Show and 60 Minutes are no longer untouchable. That should frighten every single American. If scale and profit can’t save our most powerful voices, what happens to the rest of us?