The news broke today: CBS News has fired Scott Pelley, a man whose face is as synonymous with ‘respectable journalism’ as a sepia filter is with nostalgia. The network, in a move that shocks no one who has witnessed the slow, agonising death of American broadcast news, has decided that Pelley’s brand of grave, measured reporting belongs in a museum. Or rather, the trash bin.
This is not a tragedy. It is a culling. And it reeks of the same intellectual decadence that turned the Roman Republic into a petting zoo.
Pelley, a 60 Minutes correspondent with a voice that could sell you a used chariot, was the last bastion of a dying breed: the journalist who actually believed in facts. But facts, much like Latin, are out of fashion. CBS, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to chase the algorithm, the click, the viral soundbite.
They have realised that the only thing worse than a boring story is a story that makes you think. So they fired Pelley. Why?
Because he was a reminder of a time when news was not a content farm. He was the man who interviewed dictators and made them sweat. He was the man who exposed corporate malfeasance.
He was, in short, a liability. In the Victorian era, we had a word for such men: ‘troublemakers’. They were best kept in the colonies.
Today, CBS has simply sent him to the colonies of unemployment. The irony is rich. Pelley, the man who reported on the fall of Wall Street, the war in Iraq, the collapse of trust in institutions, is now a victim of that collapse.
The network that once prided itself on ‘quality journalism’ has become a reality show. They are not firing Pelley for poor ratings. They are firing him because his presence is a rebuke.
It is a mirror held up to a newsroom that has traded integrity for engagement. What do we expect next? Perhaps they will replace him with a parrot.
Or a TikTok influencer. After all, the news is not about informing the public. It is about keeping them glued to the screen, preferably with a spot of outrage or a dash of self-pity.
This is the Fall of Rome, but with better lighting. The barbarians are not at the gates. They are in the executive suites.
And they are wielding spreadsheets. So let us pour one out for Scott Pelley. He was a dinosaur.
He believed in a dead god. But in a world of Kardashians and clickbait, perhaps the dinosaur was the only honest creature left. CBS has made its choice.
The rest of us should take note: the age of reason is over. The age of entertainment has begun.
