The news broke with all the subtlety of a collapsing Roman aqueduct: CBS has shown the door to Scott Pelley, one of the last true titans of American broadcast journalism. For those of us who have watched the gradual intellectual decay of the Western media with a mixture of horror and scholarly detachment, this is not merely a corporate reshuffle. It is a symptom, a sign, a portent. We are witnessing the empire’s final innings, where the guardians of fact are replaced by court jesters and click-farm overseers.
Let us not mince words. Scott Pelley was not just a newsman on ’60 Minutes’. He was the embodiment of that increasingly quaint notion that journalism demands rigour, nuance, and a certain moral gravity. He reported from war zones, interrogated presidents, and never once stooped to the sort of performative outrage that now passes for punditry. Yet none of that mattered. In an era where the news cycle is powered by algorithm-engineered rage, Pelley’s brand of sober, fact-based storytelling has become an anachronism. And anachronisms, as history teaches us, are ruthlessly dispatched.
Compare this to the fall of the Roman Republic, when the Censors—those who guarded public morality—were gradually stripped of their authority, replaced by populist tribunes who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Or think of the Victorian era’s intellectual decadence, where earnest scholarship gave way to cheap sensationalism in the penny press. The pattern is unmistakable. Societies in decline do not merely lose their institutions; they lose the very idea that such institutions should exist.
What are we to make of CBS’s decision? The official line will no doubt be about “new directions” and “evolving audiences.” Nonsense. What we are seeing is the final capitulation of the old guard to the new barbarians: those who believe that journalism is a commodity, that truth is subjective, and that the highest calling is not to inform but to entertain. The same forces that turned ’60 Minutes’ from a bastion of long-form investigation into a vehicle for celebrity puff pieces have now swept aside its most distinguished standard-bearer.
Of course, the defenders of the new order will call this progress. They always do. But progress towards what? A media landscape where algorithms dictate content, where news is judged not by accuracy but by engagement, and where the Scott Pelleys of this world are shunted aside for TikTok-ready personalities? That is not progress. That is decay dressed in corporate buzzwords.
And let us not forget the national identity at stake here. America was once a beacon for free and fearless journalism. Now it imports its media models from the fever swamps of the internet. The sacking of Pelley is a small but ghastly milestone in the long decline of American exceptionalism. When a nation no longer values the men and women who ask hard questions, it ceases to be a serious country. It becomes a circus.
Some will dismiss this as the hand-wringing of an old man who longs for a golden age that never quite existed. They are wrong. The golden age did exist: it was the era when ’60 Minutes’ could command thirty million viewers for a story about banking malpractice. That age is gone. And in its place we have the Pelley purge: a sad, inevitable coda to a civilisation that has forgotten why journalism matters.
To those who say I exaggerate, I say: read Edward Gibbon. Read any account of a falling empire. The pattern is always the same. First the barbarians arrive. Then the elites collaborate. And finally the men of integrity are cast out. Scott Pelley’s dismissal is not just a news item. It is a warning. Heed it, if you dare.
