Dylan Byers reports that the great Scott Pelley may be exiting “60 Minutes” any time now after having a less than productive meeting with the new bosses.
Pelley is over it, and tired of dealing with the puppets that have been installed at his legacy Tv show and network.
As luck would have it, Pelley has written the foreword to a book coming out this October by a CBS legend, producer Harry Moses. Moses is a much awarded veteran documentary filmmaker who also produced over 100 stories for “60 Minutes” in its early days.
Moses’s book is called “Mad as Hell,” a reference to the famous line from the wrenching media movie, “Network.”
What Pelley writes in the foreword are words that if we don’t live by now, we will be doomed. For CBS News, long revered as the gold standard of journalism, to be destroyed now over a petty president and corporate interests, is a massive tragedy.
“Moses believes—as I do—that the scales of justice tilt toward the powerful. Journalism is one of the weights that bring democracy closer to balance. Not because reporters are heroes, and not because they are infallible. Moses is honest on both points.”
He continues: “What 60 Minutes understood from the beginning, and what
Harry Moses helped invent, is that journalism in America works best
when it is built around a story we can recognize…There is no democracy without a free and independent press. James Madison once wrote that freedom of the press is the right that guarantees all the others.
“The First Amendment is forty-five words. It contains no aster-
isks, no exceptions, no fine print. It does not say the press shall be
free except when the powerful find it inconvenient. It does not say
the press shall be free unless its findings are embarrassing, expen-
sive, or disruptive to the established order. The framers, who had just
finished a war with a king, understood something we are in danger of
forgetting: a republic without an aggressive, independent press is not
a republic at all. It is a stage set.”
