MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: Tick. Tick. Tick.

By Marc C. Johnson

I’ll admit from the get go that this may be one of those pieces where everything that can be said has been said, but not everyone has said it.

Bear with me as I ruminate on the end of CBS News as we once knew it and what American journalism tells us about American democracy.

I go way back with CBS.

My first real broadcasting job was at a CBS radio affiliate and I remember the (rookie) challenges of properly timing the lead into the hourly news cast. Too quick and you created dead air. Too slow and you clipped the “stinger” at the head of the news cast. ¹

Walter Cronkite was, and remains, a broadcast news legend and a personal hero.

Dan Rather made an appearance at my college while I was engaged in getting a degree in broadcast journalism. I recall that he was asked – this was about 1973 – if there was really a “liberal bias” in journalism?

Rather’s answer has stuck with me all this years. He said, I’m paraphrasing, “every beginning reporter spends time covering the police station on Saturday night, and you see and experience all kinds of human and societal problems – drugs, alcohol, child abuse, domestic violence and more. Given that front row seat on how our society doesn’t work for many people it’s not all that surprising that many reporters lean liberal, and think there must be a better way.”

I’ve always considered journalistic “objectivity” a myth. No one is wired to be objective. The goal is fairness and, yes, as Rather said, fairness with empathy and understanding.

Or as the great reporter Neil Sheehan once said, the objective is to get as close to the truth as one ever can.

What has been happening to CBS – and to way too many vastly important news organizations – is not about nostalgic longing for a Cronkite sign off or a Mike Wallace 60 Minutes interview. What is at stake is what happens in a democracy when the truth seekers and truth tellers are silenced or disappeared.

The meltdown at CBS under a regime that is determined to placate an authoritarian government in order to make a corporate deal is a tragedy for the talented people trampled in the stampede to make money, but it is also a tragedy because a free, vigorous, truth seeking press is absolutely essential to a functioning democracy. ²

Wires and lights in a box

The Ed Murrow quote at the top of this piece is from his famous speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) in 1958.

You really should read the whole thing.

Murrow candidly and brilliantly diagnosed what ailed broadcasting, both news and entertainment, in his long ago speech, and it is impossible to read it today without realizing how correctly he forecast the future:

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and, at times, demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles. The top management of the networks with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. Frequently they have neither the time nor the competence to do this. It is, after all, not easy for the same small group of men to decide whether to buy a new station for millions of dollars, build a new building, alter the rate card, buy a new Western, sell a soap opera, decide what defensive line to take in connection with the latest Congressional inquiry, how much money to spend on promoting a new program, what additions or deletions should be made in the existing covey or clutch of vice-presidents, and at the same time– frequently on the long, same long day–to give mature, thoughtful consideration to the manifold problems that confront those who are charged with the responsibility for news and public affairs.

Murrow might have been describing David Ellison, the new owner of CBS, and the vastly inexperienced Bari Weiss who he put in charge of the news division.

More Murrow:

Sometimes there is a clash between the public interest and the corporate interest. A telephone call or a letter from a proper quarter in Washington is treated rather more seriously than a communication from an irate but not politically potent viewer. It is tempting enough to give away a little air time for frequently irresponsible and unwarranted utterances in an effort to temper the wind of political criticism. But this could well be the subject of a separate and even lengthier and drearier dissertation.

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Murrow could turn a phrase as when he bemoaned “five, six, or a dozen contraceptive layers of vice-presidents, public relations counsel and advertising agencies” who dominate the business of selling stuff over the air. Then he really turned it up.

Maybe he could see a Donald Trump in the nation’s future:

… this nation is now in competition with malignant forces of evil who are using every instrument at their command to empty the minds of their subjects and fill those minds with slogans, determination and faith in the future. If we go on as we are, we are protecting the mind of the American public from any real contact with the menacing world that squeezes in upon us. We are engaged in a great experiment to discover whether a free public opinion can devise and direct methods of managing the affairs of the nation. We may fail. But in terms of information, we are handicapping ourselves needlessly.

Murrow was pleading for television, and television news in particular, to be more that it had already become in the late 1950’s. He could envision enlightened corporate CEO’s investing in serious journalism that examined the nation’s many problems, and to those who claimed then – and now – that the great unwashed public wouldn’t watch or pay attention, Murrow said: What’s the alternative?

To those who say people wouldn’t look; they wouldn’t be interested; they’re too complacent, indifferent and insulated, I can only reply: There is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention. But even if they are right, what have they got to lose? Because if they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.

More and more it is clear that we have the wires and lights in a box.

Assaults on journalists are assaults on truth

The strongest, most consistent pages in Donald Trump’s authoritarian playbook are his persistent lies about elections being stolen and his lie that journalists are dishonest. Those lies are the foundation on which Trumpism rests. (Well, of course, there is also Trump’s personal corruption, but as bad as that is it does not fundamentally threaten American democracy as the two big lies do.) ³

And what is happening at CBS is not happening in a vacuum. David Ellison wanted to buy CBS and Shari Redstone wanted to sell so the network in essence paid a bribe to Trump – a $16 million bribe – to grease the deal. The “settlement” was for a nonsense lawsuit “completely without merit” and, not by coincidence, it involved 60 Minutes.

Stephen Colbert called it “a big fat bribe.” CBS cancelled him.

Bari Weiss, never having worked in broadcast journalism, was hired, it’s now clear, to clean house at 60 Minutes in service to placating Trump.

And, of course, Trump essentially confirmed all this by attacking Scott Pelley, the 37-year veteran of CBS News, who was fired last week from his job at 60 Minutes along with the broadcast’s executive producer, two other correspondents and several others who have been with the storied program for years.

Trump called Pelley a member of the “stupid, crooked people that don’t care about your country.”

What a crock, but a necessary crock in the Trumpian strategy to delegitimize independent journalism.

As Pelley told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times:

You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions that the president used about me might be applicable, not that one. [Tears up] There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. That is why I am a journalist.

Pelley confirmed to Garcia-Navarro, as other fired CBS correspondents have, that Weiss tried to interfere with 60 Minutes reporting to soften or alter stories in ways favorable to the Trump regime.

“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,” Pelley told The Times.

None of them are perfect

Journalists are people with opinions, experiences, maybe some expertise, but few would claim to be above criticism or immune from error. Most of the journalists I’ve known, and there have been many, have the same motivation that Scott Pelley has.

They want to provide information to a distracted public, including information that is occasionally uncomfortable to otherwise very comfortable people. They make mistakes. They often stress the trivial or the unimportant. Some of them take themselves way too seriously. They also have kids and mortgages and except for a rare few pretty meager salaries.

Yet they are motivated to cover the school board and the state legislature and try to explain how things really work and why.

They also report on Watergate, the Moon landing, the excesses of the CIA, and the mistakes in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. They report on evil men like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. And they continue to expose Donald Trump’s corruption.

The best of them resist the kind of political pressure that a Bari Weiss has brought to CBS. The best of them try hard not to be Fox News. The best of them hope that if they are ever confronted with what the 60 Minutes staff has faced that they will behave like Pelley, reminding the rest of us what the craft of journalism is all about.

Our history will be what we make it

One final Ed Murrow passage:

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps in color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, AND PAY LATER.

I hope 60 Minutes survives in something like the form that has made it the most successful television news program in history. I doubt CBS News will survive what is happening to it, or that CBS writ large will ever completely recover from such avarice, corruption and incompetence.

Consider CBS a metaphor for the country.

The once “Tiffany Network” destroyed by greedy people for specious political reasons. And those indefensible actions encouraged and excused by a raging, aging demagogue who has the gall to label journalists crooked or lacking in patriotism.

Never has fearless, speak truth to power journalism been more important.

We should pause to honor the courage and decency of a Scott Pelley and his colleagues and embrace what they stand for, but then immediately recommit to rejecting the greedy, grubbing people who have forgotten, if ever they knew, what it is to act in the public interest rather than their own.