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60 Minutes was a journalistic institution for over half a century, with first-rate investigations and growing ratings.
Like Colbert and the rest of CBS News, 60 Minutes is being dismantled, sabotaged, and corrupted for one sinister reason: appeasing Donald Trump.
Scott Pelley was fired in furtherance of this agenda.
Rachel Maddow has an interesting proposal.
He’s been fired by the new management of CBS News
On Monday, bombshell reports described legendary journalist Scott Pelley bluntly challenging a new 60 Minutes executive producer.
Bari Weiss has become the thoroughly unqualified head of CBS News.
She isn’t there to improve ratings — which is good, because she hasn’t. Rather, she’s there to enforce ideologies to please Paramount’s new billionaire owner. And, of course, to appease the Trump regime.
During the meeting, Pelley reportedly questioned Nick Bilton (the new executive producer’s) credentials, or lack thereof. He also called out the obvious dismantling of the show, including mass layoffs, as “cruelty.” Which it is.
Hours after reports of this exchange circulated, Bilton fired Pelley — one of the most recognizable 60 Minutes journalists in the show’s history. He had, it seemed, hurt the man’s feelings.
As you can see, Rachel Maddow used her position on MS NOW to cover the story extensively.
She bluntly expressed a hope for Pelley’s future even as she skewered the ill-informed trolls who are dismantling journalistic institutions out of spite.
“There’s no pretense,” she pointed out. “There’s no saying this is for any other reasons.”
She admitted: “I don’t know where Scott Pelley will land.”
Maddow added: “Frankly, I hope he lands right here.”
‘I hope he’s on TV tomorrow’
Maddow drew multiple connections to actions of other fascist strongmen, like the recently dethroned Victor Orban in Hungary. (Narendra Modi in India is perhaps an even better example.)
“And when the president baldly says, ‘I am going to use the power of the state in order to get the media that I want,’ and he lines up oligarchic friends in order to do that for him,” she reasoned.
“I hope he’s on TV tomorrow,” Maddow emphasized. She then pointed out how this is larger than any journalist, show, or network, but about fundamental American freedoms that are slipping away under the Trump regime.
“And I hope that everybody in journalism and everybody who values a free press figures out ways to outmaneuver the people who are trying to take the free press from us,” Maddow aspired.
She acknowledged: “But it is a fully joined fight at this point.”
Pelley’s response to his firing included direction accusations of management’s misuse of 60 Minutes and of CBS News in order to push an agenda.
This has included instructing him to “inject falsehoods” into his reporting. He managed to ignore these instructions.
Speculative fiction often imagines fascist takeovers as involving armed men with guns. As we’ve seen on the streets of Minneapolis, of Los Angeles, of DC, of Memphis, and more — that isn’t inaccurate.
But when it comes to taking over the media, all that it takes is a small number of billionaire collaborators to buy these monolithic institutions and gut them into twisted mockeries of themselves.
The remedy will require more than ousting these takeovers. Among many other things, the overthrow of the Trump regime will need to be followed by holding his enablers and collaborators to account for their crimes against America.
In the mean time, yes, we hope that Scott Pelley lands on his feet — at MS NOW or elsewhere.