What Pelley has not declined to do is run his mouth: loudly, emotionally, dishonestly, and very publicly, to anyone who will listen.

I worked as a writer, reporter, and editor for various publications for more than 10 years. So, I’ve worked inside newsrooms and, before that, in the business world. And watching the Pelley spectacle, I keep coming back to the same thought: The rules that apply in every other profession apply here, too.

You have a boss. What the boss says goes. You do the job you were hired to do, or you find another job. What you do not do, if you want to be taken seriously, is hijack a staff meeting to scream at your new executive producer, question his qualifications to his face in front of 50 colleagues, accuse leadership of “murdering” the program, and then act shocked when you are shown the door. What you especially do not do is immediately leak the whole episode to the New York Times and then performatively engage in public grief sessions about the consequences.

Pelley was paid millions of dollars to work at CBS. He had a 37-year run at the network. He is not a sympathetic figure. He is a very well-compensated professional who made a scene, got fired for cause, and is now treating his termination as a national tragedy and some kind of attack on journalism.

I know something about ideological issues in a newsroom. When I joined the Dallas Morning News editorial board, I was, for a stretch, the only conservative in board meetings, pitching ideas that no one else thought about writing. It was uncomfortable at times, but it was manageable, in part because editorial page editor Keven Ann Willey ran a professional operation. She was diplomatic, and the disagreements stayed where they belonged: inside the room.

When Willey retired after 15 years, the paper brought in Brendan Miniter, a former Wall Street Journal editorial page editor who had also served as the George W. Bush Presidential Center senior editorial director. Miniter was more conservative, direct, and unambiguous about what he wanted from his team. The ideological temperature in those meetings shifted accordingly.

My colleague, Michael Lindenberger, felt that shift more than most. He was a gifted editorial writer, one of the best I worked alongside, and a good friend even though we disagreed on nearly everything politically — though we were both staunch defenders of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Under Willey, Lindenberger had little trouble getting his editorials approved. When Miniter arrived, that changed. Suddenly, he was the one making cases to someone who wasn’t predisposed to agree, and the friction that had eased for me heightened for him.

They went at it regularly. Editorial board meetings grew into genuine debates, sometimes sharp ones. After the 2017 church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Lindenberger pushed hard for editorials calling for stronger gun control measures. Miniter pushed back, not based on any personal attachment to firearms but on the substantive argument that the proposed policies wouldn’t accomplish what their proponents claimed. The board did not publish a gun control editorial. Lindenberger made his case through a column instead. He lost that argument at the editorial level, wrote his piece, and came back to the next meeting.

That is how it works. That is how it is supposed to work.

Neither of us screamed at a boss. Neither of us ran to another outlet to air grievances. Neither of us made accusations we couldn’t or wouldn’t back up. Lindenberger eventually reached a point where working under Miniter wasn’t working out, and he left the Dallas Morning News for the Houston Chronicle, where he was part of the team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. He died in December of that year, just after being named vice president and editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star, a title he had barely taken on before he was gone. He was, by any measure, a serious journalist who handled professional disagreement the way serious journalists do.

The Pelley situation illustrates a long-standing problem that has infected elite media culture: the belief that journalism is not a job but a calling, and that journalists, by virtue of their mission, are exempt from the ordinary rules of professional conduct. The press badge becomes a kind of moral shield. Editors at the upper level are obstacles to truth rather than supervisors with authority. And getting fired is not a professional consequence but an assault on the First Amendment.

This is absolute nonsense, and it does real damage to the credibility of the profession.

The journalists who do the best work tend to be the ones least prone to such posturing. They file, they argue internally when they disagree, they lose some of those arguments, and yes, they will complain to colleagues but will do so in private. Yet they keep going. The ones who end up on television shedding crocodile tears about murdered spouses are usually the ones whose legend of themselves has grown larger than their output.

SANCTIMONIOUS SCOTT PELLEY FINDS OUT NO ONE IS INDISPENSABLE

Pelley’s specific accusation against Weiss may or may not have merit. CBS denies it, calling her editorial notes routine back-and-forth. Maybe he has the receipts, and we’ll see them eventually. But even if every word of his account is true, the way he chose to handle it — blowing up publicly, refusing to take the grievance via proper channels, turning his firing into a media event — diminishes the very credibility he is trying to defend.

Being a journalist doesn’t mean you never have to answer to anyone. It means you have an obligation to get things right, and that obligation extends to how you conduct yourself when you disagree with the people writing your checks. Scott Pelley forgot that. He shouldn’t be surprised that so few people outside CBS, except for other journalists of the same mindset, are rushing to say so.