Scott Pelley Is Out. So What?

The demise of the news anchor as someone who matters.

Scott Pelley thinks he’s important. He’s going to learn quickly that he is not.

Years ago a friend of mine in DC commented that he knew a lot of people who thought they were big shots, because while they were in important government jobs people treated them like big shots. It was nice to be so liked and admired.

Then when they left the important jobs, they didn’t feel nearly so liked and admired anymore. Turned out that what people liked and admired about them wasn’t their personal qualities, but the big shot jobs — or, more specifically, what they hoped the holder of those big shot jobs could do for them. No job, no big shot treatment.

He commented that it was hilarious how often people felt this way, especially since most of them had been dealing with other people in and out of big shot jobs for most of their careers.

Well, that’s Scott Pelley’s situation, but I don’t think he knows it yet.

What’s a news anchor’s skillset? You have to be able to look at the camera and read off a teleprompter while sounding natural — not as easy as it looks, if you’ve never done it before, but my daughter mastered it in an afternoon at a local TV station when she was in 8th grade. You have to look good on camera — maybe not movie-star good, but you have to have a pleasant, trustworthy face. And that’s mostly it.

Those skills serve you well as long as you’re occupying your network perch, but there aren’t many such perches, and once you’re off of them they don’t carry you very far.

That’s especially true since in the last couple of decades TV news has been less important, and people care about it less. Who actually misses David Muir or Jeff Glor? More people miss Alex Trebek, the departed host of Jeopardy. Brian Williams at least inspired some amusing liar memes, but nobody actually misses him.

The original idea of the anchorman sort of made sense: Nobody could trust the faceless crews that produce TV news. But everyone knew the anchorman (or, later, -woman). The thinking was that if viewers felt they could trust the anchorman not to present news that was false or misleading, they’d trust the program. If you thought Ron Burgundy would quit rather than present false news, you’d trust him and by extension the news he was presenting in a voice like velvet.

The problem was, you couldn’t trust the anchors because in fact they lacked the integrity. They were, at bottom a mixture of corporate drones and ideological warriors. (There wasn’t much conflict between these roles because the corporate operation itself was also made up of ideological warriors. Political diversity in newsrooms disappeared in the last century, and it was never great. Leslie Stahl couldn’t name any conservative journalists at her network back in 2003. It hasn’t gotten better.) Even such highly trusted a figure as Walter Cronkite was basically a fraud offering — knowingly — liberalism in the guise of objectivity.

People caught on. Of course, TV news is obsolete anyway, with more people getting their news from X — the single biggest news media source on the planet — and from various other news media sources. But one reason that people turned to those alternatives was a loss of trust in, and affection for, the old media.

At any rate, Scott Pelley was a big shot in the media world when he sat atop a big CBS operation. But even then he mattered a lot less in the real world than he thought. He will no longer be such a big shot anywhere after he’s gone. Just ask Keith Olbermann.

If you can find him.

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