Journalism is supposed to speak truth to power, as when Walter Cronkite reported, on the CBS airwaves, that the Vietnam war was not progressing as the US government was claiming, or when the Washington Post revealed, through its Watergate reporting, that the Nixon administration was corrupt.

Truth to power. Or, as the New York Times motto has it, telling it straight, “without fear or favor”.

But when Scott Pelley did exactly that by telling CBS, his own workplace of more than three decades, what he thought it needed to hear, they axed him.

Rather than hearing the truth that Pelley spoke in a staff meeting Monday, rather than taking it seriously and vowing reform, the bosses treated his remarks as grounds for dismissal. He was fired on Tuesday “for cause”.

And, as a result, 60 Minutes – the admired, lucrative and top-rated Sunday evening news program – will never be the same. Pelley has been the most prominent correspondent on that show in recent years, and its public-facing heart and soul.

Pelley plainly believes that the destruction of a storied institution is the result, and perhaps the point, of what his bosses are doing. It started when the chief executive of CBS’s parent company, tech scion David Ellison, named Bari Weiss the top editor of CBS News last fall.

With no broadcast TV experience, the........

© The Guardian