“The 60 Minutes that broke the Abu Ghraib story, that made powerful people afraid of the phrase “Mike Wallace is here,” is not long for this world. Maybe it’s already gone. What replaces it will look like 60 Minutes. It’ll have the same theme music and the same ticking stopwatch. It might even do good journalism sometimes, on topics that don’t threaten the interests of ownership or the administration they depend on. But it won’t be the same thing. You can’t be an “investigative powerhouse,” as Alfonsi put it, if the subjects of your investigations can veto your stories by refusing to participate. You can’t hold power accountable if the people who sign your checks need favors from that power. You can’t tell the truth if telling the truth is bad for business. Somewhere out there, there’s a story about the next human rights abuse, the next government scandal, the next thing the administration doesn’t want Americans to know about. Maybe it involves CECOT. Maybe it involves something we haven’t heard of yet. Under the old rules of journalism, a network like CBS might have pursued that story, taken the heat, and trusted that the audience would reward them for it. Under the new rules, that story probably won’t get pitched. And if it does get pitched, it won’t get approved. And if it somehow does get approved, it’ll get killed before it airs, just like the CECOT segment, because somebody upstairs will decide it’s not worth the trouble. That’s the kill switch. It’s working perfectly.”
— The Kill Switch - by Parker Molloy - The Present Age
