For CBS and '60 Minutes,' It's a Slow-Motion Saturday Night Massacre

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It’s never particularly flattering to be compared to Richard Nixon in the throes of Watergate, but watching events unfold at CBS News — with President Wendy McMahon as the latest resignation and other abrupt exits as parent Paramount Global casts about for someone to perform extremely unsavory tasks — brings to mind what came to be known as Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.

For those in need of a refresher course, Nixon decided he wanted to oust Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, ordering Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire him. Both men refused and resigned, before then-Solicitor General Robert Bork (later unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court) agreed to carry out the firing, unleashing a firestorm that eventually led to calls for Nixon’s impeachment and his resignation.

The massacre at CBS News has unfolded at a slower pace, and it poses a slightly different but analogous dilemma. The pressure here has come in the face of President Trump’s relentless attacks on “60 Minutes,” its venerable newsmagazine, as part of his larger campaign against the press, and Paramount’s eagerness to mollify him in order to secure approval for its planned merger with Skydance Media.

CBS has already witnessed the departure of “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens, and now CBS News President Wendy McMahon, raising this rather unsettling question: When you actually find someone willing to capitulate to Trump’s demands, from a journalistic standpoint, would you actually want those people running “60 Minutes” and CBS News?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cbs-60-minutes-slow-motion-210838243.html