In the third season of the television series “The West Wing,” there is an episode titled “Hartsfield’s Landing.” In this episode, the fictional President Bartlett engages in multiple simultaneous games of chess with staffers Toby Ziegler and Sam Seaborn. As with every episode of creator Aaron Sorkin’s political drama, the chess playing is one of multiple storylines taking place against the backdrop of waiting for the first votes to be cast in Bartlett’s re-election bid. As political junkies know, the honor of casting and counting the first ballots on each Election Day goes to a few tiny towns in New Hampshire, who conduct their Presidential balloting just after Midnight. Sorkin created the fictional town of “Hartsfield Landing” to stand in for the real life locations of Dixville Notch, Millsfield and Hart’s Location, which are allowed to vote first by a New Hampshire state law allowing any town with under 100 residents to conduct their election early and be the very first returns counted in the first hours of each Election Day.

Back to the chess-playing storyline in this episode. It provides a thread for Martin Sheen’s portrayal of President Josiah Bartlett to battle Ziegler, his White House Director of Communications, over an unfinished conversation about Bartlett’s complicated relationship with his late father, while schooling Deputy Director of Communications Sam Seaborn about an unfolding international standoff with China. While Sam struggles to play chess against his boss, a master at the game, the President urges him on more than one occasion to “See the whole board."

Anyone who has struggled to learn the game of chess and played against someone much more talented has likely heard the same thing. It is, as much of the game of chess can be, an interesting metaphor for much of life.

We tell you all this because this week, we have been struggling to "see the whole board” in real life.

As is often the case on a chessboard, many pieces are in play simultaneously. And it can be easy to be distracted in one part of the board by what the pawns and other pieces are in position to do, while your King is seemingly a few moves away from being checkmated, thus ending the game. 

And so the capturing of one noble knight was a move that we didn’t see coming. This past Tuesday afternoon, the news broke that Bill Owens, the vaunted Executive Producer of CBS News’s “60 Minutes” had just announced that he was resigning from his position and making it painfully clear that he had no choice but to do so because his “editorial independence” to run the broadcast as he saw fit had been curtailed—if not outright eliminated.

The real-life struggle against corporate meddling in the CBS News division would be playing out in the network’s broadcast center facility on West 57th Street on this Tuesday afternoon in April. That’s about a dozen blocks away from Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre, where George Clooney is nightly reprising Edward R. Murrow’s role in a similar battle for journalistic independence at CBS News against an influential political figure. The story in the play “Good Night and Good Luck” took place some seven decades earlier--when news icon Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly took on the actions of Wisconsin’s junior US Senator and anti-communism crusader, Joseph R. McCarthy.

Then, seemingly as now, the people who control the corporation that owns and operates CBS News face tremendous pressure from those in power in Washington to temper a television news program that some in political power see as a threat. Back in the 1950s, the pressure on CBS and its then-Chairman William S. Paley came from its advertisers. Today, the pressure is from an administration that appears willing to fight in the courts and via the governmental agencies that regulate the corporation that owns CBS, Paramount Global, and the latter’s future business plans.

In both cases, the politician's goal is the same: Chill a news organization's free speech by casting doubt on its practice of unblinking journalism and its motives in reporting what it does. This playbook hasn’t changed over the years. But now the gullibility of a significant part of the audience, bombarded by a never-ending cascade of misinformation from sources with clear agendas, seemingly has.

None of broadcast journalism’s network institutions is immune to all of this. They haven’t been since they became assets in major corporations with global businesses, which focus more on Wall Street than Madison Avenue. This has been true since GE took over NBC in 1986, followed by Westinghouse merging with CBS in 1994 and Disney taking over ABC in 1995. Disney was an entertainment-focused corporation, whereas GE and Westinghouse were industrial giants that made locomotives and nuclear reactors. Both had also made television sets, and each owned radio and TV properties, so the general belief was that they would easily incorporate television networks into their large company portfolios.

However, each discovered that running major news organizations doesn’t always align with a corporation’s business goals. Newsrooms and the professionals who populate them are notoriously independently minded. They take the whole “speaking truth to power” idea very seriously. And when the practice of journalism rubs against the business aspirations of billionaires who need the approval of government agencies to complete their transactions, something usually has to give.

To many, we seem to have reached that point in the proceedings. It is not the first time.

In 1930, William S. Paley, the head of the Columbia Broadcasting System, created the growing radio network's news division. Paley would champion a strong news presence, first on radio and later on television. The news division, first led by Paul White, would quickly build a legendary reputation. White would hire a young Ed Murrow, who would be one of the voices who informed the nation about the Second World War from the rooftops of London and the battlefields of Europe. Murrow would go on to lead CBS News himself and become the face of the television network’s news independence when his “See It Now” would take on Senator McCarthy in 1954. Murrow and his boss, Bill Paley, would clash over the reporting on McCarthy, which led to the loss of the program’s sponsor, The Aluminum Corporation of America, known as ALCOA. Paley’s ultimate decision was not to interfere with Murrow’s coverage, but ultimately, he would purportedly curtail the news program’s schedule due to low ratings. That is the story that is now being performed nightly on a Broadway stage.

The director in the control room for those “See It Now” telecasts was one Don Hewitt, who had arrived at the network in 1948. Some twenty years later in 1968, Hewitt would create a new weekly news “magazine” for CBS with the name “60 Minutes.” He would serve as the Executive Producer of the program until 2005. 

And while Bill Paley largely championed his network’s news independence over the decades he led CBS, on occasion he would make a decision that circumscribed CBS News coverage in certain situations, One such decision came in 1972, when Paley ordered the shortening of a series by the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite reporting on the emerging Watergate scandal. Paley’s decision followed complaints from Chuck Colson, a White House aide to then-President Richard Nixon. Colson would eventually be the first person from the Nixon administration to serve time in a Federal prison in connection with Watergate-related charges.

Bill Paley would step down as Chairman of CBS in 1983. In 1985, CNN founder Ted Turner made an audacious bid to buy CBS. The media “maverick” had been interested in the network since there had been talks about the upstart CNN being acquired by CBS as early as 1981. Turner’s bid would fail, and he would ultimately merge his company with Time Warner a decade later, then be pushed out when Time Warner merged with internet darling AOL in 2001.

Control of CBS has changed hands multiple times since Westinghouse acquired it in 1995. Eventually, CBS Corporation would merge with Viacom in 2019 (Ironically, Viacom began as part of CBS itself), and then ViacomCBS became part of Paramount Global in 2022. (More irony, Paramount once owned 49% of CBS in its early years.) In turn, Paramount Global today is controlled by National Amusements, a company led by Shari Redstone. She wants to merge Paramount Global with Skydance Media, which David Ellison, the son of Oracle Corporation founder Larry Ellison, leads. In doing so, she reportedly stands to make upwards of 2 billion dollars**.

However, the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media needs permission from the Federal Communications Commission due to the television broadcast licenses held by CBS. A hurdle to that FCC approval is a pending lawsuit filed in Texas for $20 billion** from then-candidate, and now President, Donald Trump. The lawsuit claims that CBS and 60 Minutes engaged in “unlawful and illegal behavior” centering around claims about the editing and airing of portions of an interview with Trump’s opponent in the 2024 Presidential election, then Vice President Kamala Harris. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr subsequently has opened an FCC inquiry into the same matter.

That brings us to today and the question of what happens now that Bill Owens, the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, is stepping down from being just the third person to lead the program. Particularly if his charge that the editorial independence of the program is being compromised as part of some effort to appease the Trump administration to settle its lawsuit and allow the merger of Paramount and Skydance to proceed.

There is now much speculation about what will happen next, and little of it seems optimistic that there will be an outcome that does not involve some level of capitulation on the part of CBS.

In chess, capitulation refers to a player resigning (or surrendering) the game, thus acknowledging their loss before the game ends in checkmate. It is conceding defeat because the player’s position is untenable and there is no realistic chance of winning.

When we try to “see the whole board” at this precarious moment, imagining a different outcome for this particular match is difficult, at best.

(**Editors Note: This article has been updated from the original version to correct the amounts reported, both in the reference to what Ms. Redstone stands to make personally in the Paramount Global-Skydance Media transaction, as well as the amount in damages sought by Mr. Trump in his lawsuit against CBS, which was amended from $10 billion to $20 billion in a Feb. 2025 court filing.)