When ‘60 Minutes’ Is an Hour Too Long
Scott Pelley’s hysterical self-indulgence illustrates what’s gone wrong with the American news media.
By
Gerard Baker

June 8, 2026 12:00 pm ET

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Will America survive the murder of “60 Minutes”? Will the world?

The brutal homicide of America’s longest-running television newsmagazine was reported last week by its immaculately coiffed and richly compensated frontman Scott Pelley. For the crime of exposing this act of violence against journalism, truth and freedom, Mr. Pelley was shown the door after 37 years at the Tiffany network. These are dark days. If they can eliminate in plain sight an institution as central to the survival of the republic as Mr. Pelley and his carefully chewed spectacles, surely no one is safe.

First they came for the preening, powdered popinjays of television news, but I did not speak out because I am not a popinjay.

Forgive the sarcasm. Perhaps Mr. Pelley and his long career deserve more respect. But can we at least be proportionate and, unlike much of what he and his colleagues have been for so long, objective for a moment?

Mr. Pelley’s hysterical reaction—and that of many of his friends in the media—came in response to some editorial changes made by a new team at CBS News led by Bari Weiss, its president, whose sin is to want a different sort of journalism from that practiced at CBS and almost all other traditional media organizations for decades. The reaction should—but sadly won’t—be studied by journalism schools as an unwitting testament to the failure of the business. It is a revealing example of the tiresomely familiar sanctimony and self-absorption of our media elites. More important, it is evidence of how astoundingly ill-informed they are about the role they play in American life and how and why it has changed so dramatically.

This towering self-unawareness is widespread among media types. Someone on X, mourning the alleged demise of a TV show started in 1968, 177 years after the ratification of the First Amendment, described it as “the historical leader of the free press.” We are all prone to recency bias but this is quite something. It will have come as a surprise to readers of newspapers like this one, started in 1889, or our sister paper, The New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, and others that predate even these.

The alarm about “60 Minutes” is a quaint throwback to an era when it exercised an outsize influence on the minds of the American public. In its heyday in the 1970s, a third of the total television viewing audience tuned in on Sunday evening, not all of them having simply left the TV on after the football. These days, though still a ratings success in relative terms, “60 Minutes” averages about nine million viewers, or 3% of the adult population. Audience size isn’t everything; good journalism can have an impact well beyond its immediate reach. But if you think the traditional news networks have anything like the role they had 50 years ago, you’re living in a fantasy. The reasons for that decline are the whole point that the media people themselves miss.

In some ways it is regrettable that we no longer live in a country where the bulk of the population gathers each week (or night) to absorb news from commonly trusted sources of information, rather than the disaggregated “choose your own news” model we have today. But why is this democratic informational utopia no more? The people who killed it are the same people who cry bloody murder about attempts to make long-overdue changes to these decaying institutions. For decades they promoted a patently one-sided “journalism” that much of the audience came to understand as partisan.

I’m not crazy about corporate bosses cringing before political power to advance their own interests, as may be happening with CBS. It is a further sign of America’s rapid slide into banana-republic territory, as a creeping crony capitalism favors those who can get closest to the government. But again, have a sense of proportion about the reality of our media landscape. You may not like the method, but any obeisance to President Trump is producing only incremental shifts in the wider media picture. The American news environment is vast and expanding. If viewers think they can no longer trust CBS News, they can read, watch or listen to literally thousands of other TV shows, podcasts, newspapers, social-media influencers and more. It is vanity in every sense of the term to think they are somehow less trustworthy than a superannuated news organization dominated by one political viewpoint.

Mr. Pelley was still at it this weekend, expanding his weird homicide analogy. In an interview with the New York Times, he described the firing of some of his colleagues as being like the murder of close family members. It was another example of the solipsistic specialness these media panjandrums possess. Millions of Americans lose their jobs every year because of corporate decisions, and most of them don’t provoke it by criticizing their employer. When it’s a TV personality, it’s a crime scene.

There was something unconsciously fitting about it all: the spectacle of one old media company offering a platform to an icon of another to say something unhinged, self-obsessed and divorced from reality.


Link: Reality

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As Tucker’s being fired by Fox. The normals in the US don’t really care about either. If this happened under any other President, it wouldn’t be news. But because it happened under Trump, it’s a threat to Democracy.

It’s such a stupid thing to say until you realize who is saying it and it’s just more dramatic bullshit.