What the ‘60 Minutes’ fiasco reveals about press freedom today

Americans have long held views about press freedom that have had little connection to the real world of journalism, thinking of reporters and television newspeople as crusading, no-holds-barred, Walter Cronkite-like oracles of the truth.  

One can get a glimpse of that portrait in popular films. There we find the crafty and heroic newsman Diz Moore, in the 1939 classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Decades later, “All the President’s Men” lionized The Washington Post and reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for exposing the Watergate scandal, and the 2015 film “Spotlight” told the story of the investigative team at the Boston Globe, which exposed child sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

These are just a few examples of the journalist-as-hero myth in American popular culture. Key to that myth is the treatment of the journalist as a free agent, using the protections of the First Amendment for the public good 

But the recent “60 Minutes” fiasco suggests that in the legacy media, journalists are employees tethered to organizations with their own editorial and political commitments. The First Amendment protects journalists only from government censorship — not from interference by their corporate owners.

Press freedom has always gone only as far as the owners of newspapers, radio stations or television stations wanted it to go. The goings-on at “60 Minutes” are a reminder of that fact, and of the need for citizens to pressure those who own the media to use it in the public interest.

History suggests that while the politicization........

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