“I know you’re a conservative, but you’re a good kid,” Helen Thomas once said to me in the 1980s when I was interning for the grande dame of the White House press corps. I took it as the compliment it was — Thomas, whatever her politics, was a good mentor and treated me kindly.

Still, I chuckled at the “but” and shook my head inwardly, for it clearly meant that “conservative” and “good” seldom intersected in her lexicon.

Interning at the White House for Thomas also let me know early the lay of the land. Which helps me understand that the battle over what Bari Weiss is trying to do at CBS is much larger than just Weiss’s fate, and that much depends on her success.

If the forces of the old order win and they destroy Weiss, the legacy media may completely die, either petering out further into irrelevance or by sudden death.

The CBS staff rebelling against Weiss are used to getting their way. I experienced this reality firsthand again and again as I entered the profession in the 1980s after graduating from “the premier institution devoted to communication and the arts,” Emerson College in Boston.

The National Journalism Center brought me to Washington from Beantown in 1986 and pegged me early as a wire-service guy, so they placed me at the old United Press International, then beginning its decline. After serving with Thomas, I did a stint in the main UPI newsroom, and it was while working the congressional midterm elections that I got my next lesson.

As results were coming in showing that the Democrats would retake the Senate, an editor three or four decades my senior, suddenly and completely out of the blue, let me have it in an expletive-filled tirade. The man, whom I hadn’t met before, but who clearly had been bird-dogging me, was very happy that “your side is getting its butt kicked tonight.”

The old guy then spat out at a young, insignificant intern, “Your Reagan Revolution is over.” I understood instantly how much life must have been hard for this poor man since the Reagan Revolution began to work in 1982, and it was morning in America again. I also understood how much my very presence in the newsroom was a personal affront to him.

After my internship, I........

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