News Fix #51: Maybe you could just quit?

I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I would love to hear from you.

My plan was to take this week off from the fix while I finish up my piece on how the Supreme Court's Callais decision may lessen the local reporters' ability to create real world impact (here's a short introduction to those ideas).

But Pelley's interview with the New York Times touches on themes of that reporting worth thinking about critically, including democracy. Carla Murphy has connected the upheaval at 60 Minutes with longer standing trends in local news on her LinkedIn if you're interested in that angle.

To get fired is terrible, to get fired in public worse, and to get fired in public from a job fused with so much of your identity seems excruciating. Scott Pelley, the former 60 minutes correspondent, is speaking publicly about his firing while obviously still reeling from it.

Where is the institution of journalism rooted?

Journalism is a tradition, vocation, and set of skills as much as it is a job dependent on any particular newsroom or organization. Pelley reveres 60 Minutes as an institution worthy of preservation. But how strong can that, admittedly very high quality journalism brand remain even in the best of times. It is nested inside an entertainment company with goals including profit and political power.

We can choose where we aspire to grow and exercise journalism's collective power. I would like to see us try to imbue the functions, tasks, and practitioners of journalism with the respect we so often afford to particular news brands. I am grateful for the work of The New York Times, 60 Minutes and the like. They are in fact critical. We have to be honest, however, that even brands as storied as the Washington Post are likely to be less durable than the practices, skills, and ethics of journalism more broadly.

You can quit

The benefit of seeing journalism's value as outside its most prestigious brands is that you might save yourself from thoughts like, “correspondents don't resign from 60 minutes…there is nothing else to aspire to.” That is such a limited and limiting view about creating value with your work.

Pelley also talked briefly with Lulu Garcia-Navarro from the Times about his decision not to quit after his colleagues were fired. He said he stayed because he wanted to make change from the inside, a sentiment the remaining correspondents have echoed. There are always reasons to stay in a job. But sometimes the way to push back against abuses of power is to preserve your own, and just leave.

Stop with the hyperbole

Pelley is grieving the loss of his job and some of his ideals, but it doesn't excuse his frequent use of the words “murder” and “massacre”, to describe bad faith corporate actions.

It is aggrandizing and callous for him to describe losing his job this way, “at an emotional level, the best thing that I can imagine in terms of describing it is that it's like your spouse was murdered.”

Pelley goes on to describe CBS firing his coworkers as equivalent to, “somebody wipes out, murders a large number of your family members.” People are fired every day and murdered every day, events of differing severity, permanency, and tragedy. Reporters often insert ourselves to make a record of tragic and violent death, even when we are unwelcome. To transpose these extreme tragedies with our own lesser ones is unprofessional, and it's cruel.

Does democracy need journalism?

At one point during the interview Pelley said, “There is no democracy without journalism. It can't be done.”

The United States is a democracy that can fail to live up to its own ideals. The news reflects these imperfections, even aberrations, as often as it challenges them. It can become attached to the status quo, as when news profited from slavery by running ads for enslavers looking to capture people who had escaped their brutality.

We can instead believe it is appropriate for journalism to work openly and deliberately towards a multiracial and representative democracy or our own view of the public good. That might make Pelley's claim more true.

Take care until next week and I really am glad you're here. If you need to stand up to anybody or make any big decisions about your career in the coming days, I wish you luck.