The night before the news broke about Jimmy Kimmel being fired in September 2025, I was in a ballroom in New York City at the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization.
As a small town journalist, it was a thrill beyond my imaginings to be in the same room with the greatest reporters and editors (and Emmy and Oscar- winning actor Michael Keaton) who “plays them on TV” of the last five decades.
During his keynote address in a moment of prescience, Keaton said, “Look to the funny people” as he lamented the monopolization and crumbling wreckage of what was once an honorable and trustworthy media. Little did he know that night what was about to happen and what the body-strewn media landscape would look like a very short nine months later.
Nor did I when, in a chance moment before the official opening of the gala, I spotted Scott Pelley striding past the table I had been assigned, headed toward makeshift backstage where he would shortly deliver his opening remarks.
The list of heroes I grew up watching every night from the flickering black and white world of the newfangled square box that appeared in our livingroom when I was about five years old starts with Edward R. Murrow in the 50s Walter Cronkite – known as ‘the most trusted man in America’ in the 60s and leads to the living color of “60 Minutes” the year after I graduated from high school.
A good acquaintance of mine from New York was an editor for the first and hands-down most-viewed television news magazine of the last nearly 60 years.
So, when I recognized Pelley, I unabashedly ran after him, not quite yelling, “Scott,” and sticking out my hand as he turned with a broad smile to willingly greet me. I introduced myself as a friend of Elizabeth Sweetnam, whose eulogy Pelley offered at her funeral and asked without any explanation needed, “What are you going to do?”
He grabbed my outstretched hand and met my eyes.
“We are going to launch our season,” he said, as a grim look of determination erased the bright smile he had greeted me with, “and see what happens.”
I will spare the readers the back-and-forth lies and obfuscating offered a mere nine months since I shook hands with Scott Pelley and spewing forth from the money monsters for Pelley’s alleged “firing.” Suffice it to say, the world of unimpeachable truth telling is collapsing before our eyes under the weight of evil and unquenchable greed.
We are left in this moment with the dying embers of a time when we could turn on and to mainstream media and expect trustworthy men and women to keep us informed.
In pretending she had tried to find a workable solution after Pelley raised hell about her firing days earlier of two other outstanding correspondents, Bari Weiss, whose title is editor-in-chief, said Pelley had chosen “a different path.” There is no doubt he took the Integrity Path, where he will no doubt gather around the embers with all of the television notables of the last nine months who either chose or were left to find their own ways on that path, where they will no doubt rekindle the flames with the fuel of the First Amendment and their undying loyalty to the America we once believed might just be possible.
The FIRST ideal of our failed experiment in democracy:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
—Shaun A. Pennington is the founder and publisher emerita of the V.I. Source newspapers of general circulation launched in 1999.
