The End of the Celebrity Newsman

Commentary

There are few environments more conducive to an inflated sense of self-importance than the modern university, and having spent much of my adult life in academia, I have encountered no shortage of individuals who hold a remarkably elevated view of their own significance.

To be fair, the road to a professorship is seldom easy—years of graduate school, poorly paid assistantships, the struggle for a first appointment, and relentless pressure to publish, secure grants, and earn tenure. Those who complete the journey can be justifiably proud.

Yet one enduring lesson of institutional life is that no one is indispensable. However distinguished the curriculum vitae, the institution carries on after one’s departure, and no one in the academy is too big to fail. The ancients understood this well: pride, they warned, invariably invites nemesis, and one of the enduring temptations of the professorial life is to mistake temporary prominence for permanent glory.

This brings us to Scott Pelley. The veteran CBS news anchor recently found himself at the center of controversy after publicly criticizing his employer and its corporate leadership. Whatever the merits of his complaints, the spectacle itself was revealing. Here was a man who appeared genuinely shocked to realize that he was, in fact, expendable.

I was never a follower of Pelley, though that is beside the point. By all accounts, he is a capable journalist. He has the silver hair, measured cadence, and sonorous voice that have long defined the archetypal television newsman. He looks precisely as one imagines a network anchor should.

The problem is that the media world that created that archetype no longer exists. For much of the 20th century, a handful of broadcasters occupied a privileged place in public life. Figures such as Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, and later Pelley himself served as trusted intermediaries between events and the public. They delivered the news each evening, speaking with an authority that few questioned.

That era is over. The collapse of trust in legacy media has been one of the defining stories of the past decade. Audiences increasingly turn to podcasts, newsletters, independent journalists, YouTube channels, Substack writers, and social media feeds.

Whatever one thinks of these alternatives, they have gained prominence largely because millions of people concluded that the traditional gatekeepers—what is variously called the legacy, the mainstream, or the corporate media—could no longer be trusted to report fairly and accurately on matters of public importance.

The reasons for this catastrophic loss of trust are numerous. News organizations that once claimed impartiality increasingly adopted the language and assumptions of particular political and cultural tribes. Coverage often became less about reporting events than about managing narratives. Public skepticism, once dismissed as ignorance, grew steadily as audiences noticed the widening gap between what they were told and what they could see with their own eyes.

What makes the Pelley episode interesting is that it reveals how poorly some media personalities have adapted to the new reality. The old model depended upon scarcity. There were only a few national networks, a few major newspapers, and a handful of trusted anchors. Viewers had little choice but to listen.

Today, news, commentary, and information are abundant. The barriers to entry have collapsed. Anyone with a phone can reach an audience that once required an entire broadcast network. An independent journalist can break stories that newsrooms with hundreds of employees somehow miss. Expertise and insight—not to mention credibility—are increasingly detached from institutional affiliation.

This transformation has produced problems and issues of its own, not the least of which is that investigative journalism is expensive, well beyond the means of most independent journalists.

But it has also exposed a certain vanity at the heart of legacy journalism. Too many prominent journalists continue to behave as though they remain indispensable custodians of public truth. They speak as if democracy itself hangs in the balance of their continued presence. Yet audiences have demonstrated otherwise. Viewers leave the mainstream, and ratings decline. Trust in the corporate media continues to evaporate, and somehow democracy survives.

Journalism should never be about personalities. The reporter’s job is to illuminate the story, not to become the story. But somewhere along the way, many journalists came to regard themselves as moral instructors, guardians of national virtue, and erstwhile defenders of what many call “our democracy.” It would appear that some even began to believe their own mythology.

That is why the sight of a celebrated news anchor publicly sparring with management carries an unmistakable air of pathos. It resembles less a principled stand than the final act of a fading era, one in which television personalities imagined themselves to be indispensable pillars of public life.

The era of the celebrity newsman is passing into history. The public has moved on, and new voices, using new media, are emerging. However much it may wound the amour-propre of celebrity broadcasters, the world no longer requires stars in the newsroom. The news requires what it has always required: honest, unbiased, workmanlike journalists. Fortunately, there appears to be no shortage of individuals willing to do the work.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.