What Would Cap Do?

Scott Pelley takes a stand

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

– from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

So Spider-Man and Captain America have this conversation one night on a rooftop.

This is during “Civil War,” the Bush-era Marvel Comics miniseries about the abridgment of civil rights in a time of public panic and fear. In it, people are being required to register with the government and those who refuse to comply get hauled off to enhanced interrogations at secret prisons. And Spider-Man asks Cap how he, as the living embodiment of American values, handles it when the country itself no longer honors those values.

In response, writer J. Michael Straczynski put into the good Captain’s mouth a speech that has been showing up with conspicuous frequency on social media feeds as the Trump Reich continues its descent into fascism. “Doesn’t matter what the press says,” declares the man in the American flag costume. “Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world – ‘No, you move.’”

Which is as good a definition of moral integrity as you’re ever likely to get.

Scott Pelley also offered a pretty decent definition in getting canned by CBS News this week. Pelley, in case you missed it, essentially engineered his own firing at a staff meeting on Monday when he accused news division chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes, the flagship Sunday evening news program. Weiss, you will recall, was installed by David Ellison, the MAGA-friendly media mogul whose company acquired CBS last year. She was given the job despite the fact that she is unburdened by any relevant experience.

Not surprisingly, her eight months at the helm of what was once one of the nation’s most revered news organizations has been marked by a string of blunders and bloopers that would embarrass a reasonably self-respecting cable access channel. Last month, for instance, CBS somehow managed to send “Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil to the wrong China. Donald Trump was on the mainland for a summit in Beijing, for which anchors from NBC and ABC were dutifully on hand. But Dokoupil ended up a thousand miles away in Taipei, capital of Taiwan, after he was unable to secure a vista that would have allowed him to report from where the story was actually happening.

60 Minutes has also suffered under Weiss’ reign of error. In December, she infamously spiked a story by veteran investigative journalist Sharyn Alfonsi centering on interviews with Venezuelan men deported by the Trump regime to what the story called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador. Though the story had been vetted and cleared multiple times by the network’s lawyers and censors, Weiss pulled it just hours before showtime, a decision Alfonsi blasted as “political.” Her story eventually ran, largely unchanged except for some tacked on comments from the Trump administration. Alfonsi was terminated last month. A number of other staff members, including Tanya Simon, the show’s executive producer, were also fired.

Monday’s meeting was called to introduce her replacement, Nick Bilton, a tech journalist and filmmaker who, like Weiss, brings little pertinent experience to the job, a fact Pelley swiftly called him on. “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

Bilton, according to a recording of the meeting leaked to the New York Times, replied, “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.”

Pelley, apparently not mollified in the least, pointedly asked the new boss why he would come to 60 Minutes in the first place “knowing that you will never be welcome here.”

The next day, Pelley’s 37-year tenure at CBS News, during which he won 51 Emmy Awards, according to his network bio, was terminated. According to reports, the show’s remaining correspondents, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, were all debating whether or not to stay with the program before announcing on Friday that they would.

It is worth noting that when Bilton exited his contentious meeting with Pelley, the newsman’s colleagues are said to have serenaded him with a round of applause.

As well they should. Scott Pelley took a stand on principle. Meaning not simply that he did the right thing, but that he risked – and ultimately lost – something of value in doing so. It was an important object lesson for those who have forgotten what integrity looks like – not a difficult thing to do, given that we see it so seldom these days.

Look to your political leaders for integrity and they’re too busy approving a slush fund – $1.8 billion in public money – with which to compensate the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

Look to the judiciary for integrity and they’re too tied up with clearing the way for the GOP, the party of white supremacy for sixty years now and counting, to silence the voices of African-American voters.

Look to the news media for integrity and they’re too preoccupied with “both-sidesing” and normalizing the ongoing tragedy that is Donald Trump when they should be bringing to bear the hair-on-fire urgency with which they’d report World War III.

Maybe you find it hard to see it that way, given that, unlike a new global war, this is a slow motion emergency, an emergency moving at the speed of government. But make no mistake, it’s an emergency just the same.

Authoritarianism has arrived in the United States. Ridicule the president and lose your job. Irritate the president and expect a federal investigation. Protest the president and get gunned down in the streets. The proverbial barbarians are not at the gate, folks; they’re in the living room with their feet up on the sectional. Doesn’t anybody notice? Doesn’t anybody care?

Sometimes, you really have to wonder.

If you’ve never seen it, you should stream the movie, Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated account of CBS News’ 1953 confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Led by the redoubtable anchorman Edward R. Murrow, the network – at great corporate risk – stood up to a demagogue who was terrorizing and dividing Americans.

To look at that movie, to imbibe the conscience, the quiet courage and the sense of patriotic duty embodied by those people in that era, is to realize how much we have lost and how far we have devolved. It is to be served superfluous proof that we have become a profoundly unserious people even as we struggle to survive some of the most profoundly serious times we have ever known.

Small wonder a comic book superhero’s nearly 20-year-old monologue on moral integrity finds purchase online. Small wonder it lands like a jolt of adrenaline, a reminder that being truly American takes guts. “Plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth,” he says, “and tell the whole world – ‘No, you move.’”

And yes, a cynic might argue that there is a logical gap in Captain America’s – which is to say, J. Michael Stracynski’s – reasoning. Because what if someone’s “truth” is that blacks are inferior, abortion is murder or Donald Trump is the greatest president in 250 years? Are they also invited to resist the whole world in defense of beliefs most of us find abhorrent?

But see, here’s the thing: those people don’t need an invite, do they? They never do, they never have. To the contrary, they will never miss a chance to shove their beliefs in your face, invited or not. They will fight like mad to change the world based on those beliefs.

Consider again the words of William Butler Yeats:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

In other words, it’s the rest of us who seem to need the invitation to take a stand. Though written 107 years ago, Yeats’ words could have been written last week to describe the complaisant behavior of those of us who believe in freedom timidly, equality tepidly, democracy timorously and who, like the “sunshine soldiers and summer patriots” Thomas Paine once excoriated, shrink from “the times that try men’s souls.” They go along to get along.

But “passionate intensity” ought not – cannot – be allowed to be the exclusive province of those who are fighting to demolish this nation’s democratic mores. That’s why his colleagues applauded Scott Pelley’s example – and why the rest of us should, also. These, too, are times that try our souls. And his willingness in such times to sacrifice his career on the altar of the people’s right to know is inspirational.

Granted, he is not, on a TV anchorman’s salary, likely to have trouble making the rent going forward. But the point still stands. Whether one is an anchorman or a sanitation man, shop keeper, artist, student, talk show host, deejay, doctor, lawyer or police chief, it is increasingly the case that these difficult times are demanding the same difficult choice of us all. Do you do what you know to be right, even if it means sacrifice, or do you go along to get along? Scott Pelley just made his call.

One suspects Captain America would approve