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Scott Pelley, recently fired from "60 minutes."
Photo credit: John Paul Filo/CBS, via Associated Press
Hunkering down in a foxhole in Ukraine while bullets fly overhead. Scrolling through hate-filled posts calling for your firing or worse after you file a controversial story. Standing outside an agency’s back door for hours in a hard rain as you wait for an elusive public official to emerge.
Dangers and travails like these often define the life of a reporter.
“Newsrooms are sort of like the military or the police or the beautiful people at the FDNY down the street. It is a life-threatening job in many instances,” Scott Pelley told the New York Times after being fired this month from “60 Minutes.” Pelley’s career as a correspondent included long stints in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq, where he was embedded with US troops and came under fire.
Reporters seldom lead the glamourous lives depicted in film and television. For most it can be a grueling and stressful job whose primary reward is scratching away at the truth. Uncovering corruption or penning news articles that help create a new law to protect the most vulnerable people drives many reporters to work into the night and travel on their own dime to talk to sources. Often reporters like the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, who first began investigating Jeffrey Epstein in 2016 and kept at it when nearly all other outlets had moved on, must wait years to see their work bring about any justice or even any change.
The spectacle of powerful political and business leaders exploding at the reporters who uncovered their misdeeds or caught them in a lie is hardly new. But in the last couple of years, the anger of President Trump and his appointees like the Federal Communication Committee head Brendan Carr has inspired unprecedented attacks on reporters and their news organizations. Last month, after the Wall Street Journal’s Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo disclosed the infamous birthday card message that Trump allegedly penned to Epstein, the president retaliated by suing them and the WSJ’s owner, Rupert Murdoch.
The days are gone when a newspaper owner such as the Washington Post’s Katherine Graham in 1971 risked jail to publish the Pentagon Papers in her family’s newspaper. The following year Graham stood firm when the Nixon administration assailed reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for their unravelling of the Watergate scandal. Their courage, along with that of Graham and her top editor, Ben Bradlee, Harvard Class of 1942, provided an enduring symbol of the value of press freedom for journalists and citizens alike.
Now media owners like Paramount’s CEO David Ellison install executives like Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, to pave the way for the federal approval that is essential for the lucrative media mergers they seek. Weiss, whom Pelley has accused of an unprecedented “level of political influence,” was praised by Trump in a November 2025 “60 Minutes” interview as a “great, new leader.”
Six months later, on June 12, the Department of Justice approved the plans for Ellison’s Paramount to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery, a merger that will put CNN under Ellison’s control as well.
Observers afraid of the ways that stifling press freedom can pave the way for authoritarianism have also pointed to Carr’s announcement in May that the FCC would investigate ABC for its DEI policies. Carr’s threats have been widely viewed as not only an effort to silence irreverent late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel but also a means to curb network reporters. “ABC’s licenses are not due for renewal until 2028. The move has been widely seen as a tactic to pressure ABC to curtail negative reporting about the Administration,” wrote Ryan O’Connell ’73 in his recent Substack.
As the nation prepares for the midterm elections, it is more important than ever to support the work of reporters who investigate the threats to free and fair elections. Whether dissecting the consequences of gutting the Voting Rights Act or covering the Department of Justice’s efforts to obtain voting rolls from nearly every state, reporters are once again on the front lines safeguarding the rights of all citizens. Come November, they will undoubtedly be standing outside the polls in places like Minneapolis, El Paso and Jackson to report whether our democracy remains strong in its 250th year. They can look to their predecessors, who more than half a century ago stood watch in Selma and Charleston and gave us all a case study in reporting that made us truer to our best ideals.
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