The Press Is Not the Enemy

There Is No Democracy Without Journalism

Scott Pelley has been shot at. He spent nights in waterlogged foxholes in the desert, filed dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait, and did all of it in service of an informed American public. When Donald Trump called him "fake news" and "the enemy of the people," Pelley did not retreat into polite hedging.

Pelley joined CBS News in 1989 after years covering local Texas politics and anchored the CBS Evening News from 2011 to 2017. He spent more than two decades as a 60 Minutes correspondent, accumulating a record 51 Emmy Awards over a career taking him from the Clinton impeachment to the battlefields of Ukraine. On June 3, CBS fired him. The termination came one day after Pelley publicly confronted new executive producer Nick Bilton at a staff meeting, told him his qualifications for the job were slender, and accused incoming editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of murdering the show. Bilton's termination letter called the confrontation an ambush. In his own statement, Pelley said management had asked him to inject falsehoods and bias into his work. Weiss told staff the foundation of trust had been broken.

Four days after his termination, Pelley sat down with New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Trump had called him part of the "stupid, crooked people that don't care about your country." Pelley absorbed "stupid" and "stiff" without visible distress. The accusation about his patriotism he took personally. "I've never worn the uniform, but I've been in combat for this country, in Afghanistan, and Iraq, Kuwait," he told Garcia-Navarro. "I've been shot at, spent nights in foxholes filling up with water in the desert. I'm not aware that the President of the United States has ever done any of those things for his country. Please correct me if I'm wrong. You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions that the President used about me might be applicable, not that one."

Madison predicted this.

James Madison made this argument in 1822, in a letter to W.T. Barry. He wrote that a popular government without popular information is a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Madison and his contemporaries built the First Amendment into the constitutional structure because self-governance requires access to accurate information. The amendment codified a practical necessity. Popular government runs on informed consent, and informed consent requires a free press accountable to no one in power.

In 2020, during Trump's first term, researchers at Harvard's Shorenstein Center documented a sustained, strategic campaign to delegitimize American media institutions and measured the results in declining public trust. That erosion took years to build and has no reliable timeline for recovery.

The V-Dem Institute maintains the largest global democracy dataset in existence, covering 202 countries from 1789 through 2024. Its 2025 findings show freedom of expression as the single worst-affected component of democracy globally for more than a decade. In 2024, government censorship of the media ranked as the top indicator of democratic decline, appearing in 26 of the 45 countries actively undergoing autocratization. Across every one of those cases, governments targeted the press before democratic institutions collapsed.

The American government's relationship with the press has never been comfortable. In 1798, the Adams administration used the Sedition Act to arrest more than 20 newspaper editors, forcing their publications to shut down for printing criticism of a sitting president. During the Civil War, more than 300 newspapers were suppressed under the Lincoln administration, most of them Democratic papers the government deemed sympathetic to the Confederacy. Roosevelt established the Office of Censorship twelve days after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, issuing a Code of Wartime Practices that was officially voluntary and, in practice, something else entirely. In 1971, the Nixon administration obtained a federal restraining order blocking the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Supreme Court dissolved it in 15 days, ruling 6 to 3 that the government failed to meet the burden required to justify prior restraint.

The international record is grimmer. Nazi Germany brought every newsroom under state control by October 1933. Pinochet's Chile killed or disappeared 23 journalists between 1973 and 1990. Erdogan's Turkey led the world in imprisoned journalists for multiple consecutive years following the 2016 coup attempt. Orban's Hungary now controls roughly 80 percent of its media market through government-aligned ownership. In every one of those cases, the press was the first institution to go.

American political journalism carries real problems. Access journalism softens coverage of the sources reporters depend on for access. Economic pressure pushes outlets toward engagement metrics over factual depth. The cable news model rewards conflict. Those failures exist inside a press institution whose absence, history shows, produces something far worse than imperfect coverage.

Pelley spent 37 years doing the work the First Amendment exists to protect, in places where doing it got people killed. Trump's accusation that he does not love his country reached a man who filed reports from active combat zones, who absorbed the institutional and physical risks of that work, and who lost his job for refusing to absorb one more.

The First Amendment requires people willing to practice it under conditions that are professionally costly and physically dangerous. Pelley has spent four decades being one of those people. CBS terminated him for confronting management over editorial integrity, and he responded by sitting down with the New York Times and saying it on the record. "There is no democracy without journalism. It can't be done. And that is why I am a journalist."

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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