When I wrote that the cancellation of Stephen Colbert was the canary in the coal mine of American broadcasting, a number of readers wrote in to suggest I was over-egging the pudding.
It was just money, they said. Ratings. The brutal economics of late-night television. Well. To those readers I say, with all the grace I can muster: the canary is now dead, the miners are coughing, and CBS has just sacked the man who came down the shaft to check.
Scott Pelley, 37 years at CBS, a man who has been shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan, who reported from Ground Zero while the dust was still in the air, was fired from 60 Minutes this month in a meeting that lasted ten minutes. Ten minutes. I’ve waited longer for a flat white in Shoreditch.
The details, laid bare in his extraordinary interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro at The New York Times, read like a corporate horror story. First came what staff now call Black Thursday: Bari Weiss, parachuted in as editor-in-chief after Paramount’s Skydance takeover, sacked Tanya Simon, the first woman ever to run 60 Minutes, fresh from growing its audience nine per cent, a feat in broadcast telly roughly equivalent to teaching a cat to fetch. In her place: Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist with no broadcast experience whatsoever, who introduced himself to a newsroom of war correspondents with an email explaining that it wasn’t 1968 anymore and that petrol no longer costs 32 cents. The man then addressed fifty heartbroken journalists by reading a statement off his phone, next to a consolation spread of bagels. Bagels. As though grief were a catering problem.
But here is the part that should chill every reader of this column, whatever their politics. Pelley alleges that after a 60 Minutes piece on the deaths of two civilians during the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis had been approved by everyone, an email arrived from Weiss asking, in effect, whether the protesters could be made to look more violent, and whether a dead woman’s car could be described as driving towards the officer, which, Pelley says, is not what the video shows. “A thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events,” he called it. A level of political influence he had never seen in 37 years.
He wept in the interview. He knew exactly what would happen next, “Fox News is going to just run the parts where I’m crying and say I’m a lunatic”, and said the whole thing felt like your spouse being murdered. CBS denies political motivation, naturally. Companies always do. CBS also told us Colbert’s cancellation was “purely financial”, three days after he mocked their $16 million settlement with the president on air. At some point coincidence stops being coincidence and becomes a business model.
I keep thinking about the night I saw George Clooney’s Broadway revival of Good Night, and Good Luck, I wrote then about the slow death of the fourth estate, and how Edward R. Murrow’s stand against McCarthy felt less like history and more like prophecy. Murrow built CBS News. He warned us, in his famous 1958 “wires and lights in a box” speech, that television without conscience was merely furniture. Sixty-eight years on, his own network is proving him right with a thoroughness that borders on parody. The house Murrow built is being sold off room by room, and the new owners are ripping out the load-bearing walls because they clash with the curtains.
Why should a British business audience care? Because this is, at bottom, a business story. Paramount didn’t fold because of ideology; it folded because a merger needed regulatory approval and the regulator answered to a man with a grudge. That is the lesson for every boardroom: once you pay the danegeld, the Dane doesn’t leave. He moves in, criticises your bagels, and starts editing your scripts. Trust, whether in a brand, a balance sheet or a broadcaster, takes decades to earn and one craven settlement to squander, and CBS has just written the case study.
And the talent? It will do what talent always does when the institutions fail it, walk. Colbert will be fine. Pelley will be fine. As Piers Morgan demonstrated when he took Uncensored to YouTube, the audience now follows the journalist, not the network. The institutions, though, the newsrooms that sent pregnant correspondents into war zones because the story mattered, those take generations to build and one corporate funk to destroy.
Murrow ended his broadcasts with “good night, and good luck”. Watching CBS dismantle itself to please a president, I’d say the night has well and truly arrived. As for the luck, they’ll need it.
