Scott Pelley isn’t the only journalist forced out of a job because of changing media dynamics. But his ouster from CBS News and 60 Minutes amid the Bari Weiss-ification of the operation brought to mind my own connection to that storied institution.
When my mother graduated from high school in Wisconsin, she immediately headed to the big city of Chicago for better career prospects. There she worked a number of jobs and eventually met my father in the church choir. But somewhere between her arrival in the Windy City and dating Dad, she got to know Kurt Weihs, a CBS designer. Weihs, who designed the CBS eye logo along with Bill Golden, told my mother that he based the eye design on her eyes.
At least that’s what my late mother remembered. Weihs, a Holocaust survivor who spent most of the rest of his life in New York City, apparently was in Chicago at the right time to have met my mother. But my siblings and I decided it just became a line he told every pretty young woman— “I based the CBS logo on your eyes.”
But maybe my mom believed it enough that it’s the reason we grew up watching CBS Evening News every night and 60 Minutes on Sundays. CBS and the daily newspapers were the main sources of our news. Significantly, one we paid for, the other we didn’t. Today, the economic model for both of those media has broken down.
Pick a format, any format
We all know that newspapers have been hollowed out, as classified and other advertising fled their pages and hedge funds became the new owners, apparently interested mostly in the valuable real estate owned by the papers. TV news has also been downsized, and the Orbánization of American journalism continues apace, as regime favorites buy up influential news operations. Such as CBS News.
Digital-based news has not proved to be a viable successor. For just one example, journalist Harry Cheadle recently wrote on Persuasion about his experience at Vice Media, which went from a magazine to a multimedia company to, once again, a magazine. He lays out the folly of the ad-clicks-will-make-us-rich plan of the Millennial sites like Buzzfeed and its ilk. In brief: It didn’t work.
Previous news industry changes have resulted in more voices finding their places and making it more difficult to silence an opposition.
And in another example of media brands trying to find their space, The Onion is back in print, and apparently it’s doing fine. For years, humor publication The Onion was known for its website and social media posts, mostly getting by on funny headlines that created no need to click through for the full story or video. But the site’s newish owners are heading into the future by going back to the publication’s past. The Onion says it’s already sold 70,000 subscriptions at $99 a year. The website remains, and the company is gearing up to relaunch Infowars, the Alex Jones conspiracy platform it purchased out of bankruptcy and plans to use as a digital comedy website.
A digression is in order, because I was there at the inception. Or at least I was inception-adjacent. The Onion began as a weekly newspaper on the campus of the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where I was a student and an editor of one of the campus dailies, The Badger Herald. The Onion was a coupon paper — stories filled most of each page, with coupons along the bottom from pizzerias and other establishments. If the coupons broke no new ground, the writing did. The paper was consistently funny and even pointed. A number of its writers and editors contributed to the campus dailies, and they did not hesitate to poke fun at us — usually accurately. For example, in one side-by-side comparison of the two papers, our leftwing competitor was said to support the El Salvadoran Marxist group FMLN; the Herald was said to misspell FMLN. Alas, we were occasionally proofreading-challenged, and it was funny.
The status quo never lasts
We’re in an interregnum. People can easily say what no longer works — three big networks that make billions of dollars from advertising, or thick newspapers making millions of dollars from classified and display ads, plus subscriptions — but right now, no one knows what model will work for news media. Online advertising and clicks don’t produce anywhere near the volume needed for support, and nonprofit news is reliant on generous supporters. Individual journalists have relocated to Substack.
This is not the first time the news industry has undergone fundamental changes and faced what it feared was existential threats. When AM radio stared death in the face in the wake of the rise of FM and television, it reinvented itself as a platform for news and talk, where millions of people got their news, weather, and traffic on the hour every hour. When Georgian Ted Turner created Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980, people worried that the news world couldn’t take the saturation and competition. It did. CNN was once the danger; now it is the industry standard the insiders worry about losing.
And if the big threat, at 60 Minutes and The Washington Post and elsewhere, is a constriction in the number of ideas and points of view received by the public, well, we’re in for continued turbulence. But previous changes from CNN to AM to social media and onward have resulted in more voices finding their places and making it more difficult to silence an opposition.
People say “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” But that’s not true; the truth is, things never stay the same.
