WAS: What Adults are Saying about the Final Nail

CBS News, Pope Francis and reality's future had their coffins sealed in the same week

Dying Main Stream Media (MSM) has been broadly documented here and here before. This reality has proven to be as plodding as it is inevitable. Those still hanging on by their journalistic fingertips are routinely compromising (under the point of a corporate gun in some cases) and many whom have departed assert a continuing vanilla, navel-lint perspective here on the Substack platform. Blase’, crippled content then follows all the while some of these purveyors think they are righteously providing import. It is at times wickedly sad and surely if these folks worked on Kristi Noem’s ranch their misery (and ours) would have previously ended.

Even the top of the media totem pole has collapsed. The historic program 60 Minutes just witnessed the departure of its longtime Executive Producer Bill Owens. It’s reported that well-known media investor Shari Redstone—she a significant mover and shaker inside CBS’ corporate parent Paramount—had requested knowledge about any pending 60 Minutes stories concerning 47’s administration. It is told that Paramount is pursuing an important corporate merger that requires Federal approval and she wanted nothing to muck it up. This on the heels of a mind-bending lawsuit where 47 asserts Owens’ former program favorably biased a portrayal of Presidential candidate Kamela Harris last fall. In this context Owens evidently found Redstone’s meddling as the last straw and walked.

Mere executive resignation from a vaunted news franchise does not universally signal a program’s collapse. But when its spurred by spineless corporate bosses facilitating, or at least turning a blind-eye, to exerted political influence about editorial decisions, then the building shakes more than a 7.6 earthquake. But the real run here is this isn’t some garden variety media personality simply losing a job. This is 60 Minutes!

Arguably, it is the single most significant program ever created by American news media. It trail-blazed a completely new style of television journalism and has done so without interruption since 1967. It is our culture’s textbook example of media working as the fourth estate—so much so that in its 58 years it hasn’t even bothered to replace or update its iconic program opening—something of a non-sequiter now deep into the digital era.

What’s worse its not just 60 Minutes getting gutted but also the last vestiges of the gold standard of media in the television age—namely CBS news. This the network of Murrow, Cronkite, Severeid, Edwards, Rather, Salant, Hottelet, Wallace, Reasoner, Stahl and many many others—was a decades long titan in revealing America’s growing perspective to herself. As the nation blossomed into the television age CBS was always regarded as a cut above its competitors down the street at NBC or ABC. The work undertaken there was deadly serious in this regard and buoyed by an originally strong bond between Murrow and iconic CBS founder William Paley, the editorial side at CBS was long insulated from the buffeting effects of the network’s business office.

Now, today, the type of corporate greed and institutional capitulation that will define the 20’s heavily shrouds our days especially for anyone who might dare to be “media”. To offer the greatest understatement in a long time, these times, they are a changing. Exactly the times for which CBS was perfectly made. When Murrow reported from London during WWII he set the stage for Rather to do the same from the rice paddies of Vietnam and for that same path to be followed by many others. As times have shifted, where the country’s danger looms most from internal forces, it can surely be said the outcome of our present turmoil will have lasting impact on the future of America. An America that now will proceed without the fundamental perspective from CBS.

Given this, one then must ask is the collapse of CBS news vis a vis its flagship program a canary in the coal mine? It having occurred mere hours after the death of a uniquely common and accessible Pope who was perfectly made for today’s turbulent times and whom will be hard to replace? It having occurred mere days prior to the 50th anniversary of Saigon’s fall where so many from that time continue to suffer the sting of an enormous defeat? It occurring as our executive government leaders try mightily, everyday, to turn our visceral reality into cosplay so that a grotesque political aim might be had? The America we all think we want is shifting in real time, rapidly, in front of our very eyes. We will be the worse for understanding and surviving what this brings without the aid of a credible CBS news.