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By Brian Hews
Publisher | Follow X
The Fantasy of Staying and Fighting
I’ve seen this movie before, several times.
A rich owner buys a news organization. He knows nothing about journalism, nothing about newsroom culture, and usually nothing about the business itself. But somehow he becomes convinced he can run it better than the people who spent decades building it.
Then the firings start.
The veterans leave. The bean counters arrive. The consultants show up. The owner starts talking about “modernizing” the product. Pretty soon the publication has lost the very thing that made it valuable in the first place: credibility.
Which brings us to the three remaining 60 Minutes correspondents who have decided to stay.
According to reports, they don’t want to see the program die. They believe they can protect its legacy. They appear willing to trust assurances from management that journalism will remain the priority.
That sounds admirable.
It also sounds incredibly naïve.
If management just fired some of the most respected people in television news, why exactly would anyone believe the next round won’t come? What evidence exists that the people making these decisions suddenly discovered a deep respect for independent journalism?
The correspondents say they are staying to protect the institution. Yeah like the people who stayed on Twitter to protect that.
Here’s the problem: institutions don’t survive because a few people decide to stay. They survive because ownership values what made them successful in the first place.
The notion that three correspondents are going to stand between a billionaire owner and whatever plans he has for the future is wishful thinking masquerading as strategy.
I’ve spent more than three decades in the newspaper business. I’ve watched wealthy owners buy newspapers believing they were simple businesses. They looked at a newsroom full of experienced journalists and concluded, “How hard can this be?”
Very hard, as it turns out.
Yet they all think they’re the exception.
You don’t have to look very far. Look at the Los Angeles Times. One of the great newspapers in America. A billionaire owner arrived with promises, vision, and confidence. Years later, the paper has endured turmoil, departures, controversy, and declining trust from many readers and journalists.
Because the problem was never the journalism.
The problem was believing journalism could be managed like any other business.
What disappoints me most about the three correspondents isn’t that they’re staying. It’s that they appear to believe they have leverage.
They don’t.
The leverage left the building when the firings started.
If they truly feel the same frustration and bewilderment as the colleagues who were shown the door, then at some point they have to decide whether they’re defending journalism or merely providing cover for its dismantling.
Every struggling newsroom has a handful of people who convince themselves they’re staying for the greater good. They tell themselves they’ll protect standards from the inside. They tell themselves they’ll push back when necessary.
Then six months later they’re explaining why the latest compromise wasn’t really a compromise.
Then a year later they’re defending decisions they once would have condemned.
And eventually they become the answer to a question nobody asked:
How did a great news organization lose its way?
It usually happens one rationalization at a time.
The saddest part is that the three correspondents probably know exactly what’s happening. They’re just hoping it won’t happen to them. That’s not courage.
That’s denial.
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