I began watching 60 Minutes when it premiered on September 24, 1968, when Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace introduced a new kind of television journalism: “a magazine for television,” flexible enough to go wherever the stories — and the facts — led.

What followed was more than a CBS program. For me, it became a Sunday night institution. Under Don Hewitt’s design, and through the work of Wallace, Reasoner, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Lesley Stahl, Steve Kroft, Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, and others, 60 Minutes became the gold standard for factual storytelling — from war and politics to corruption, science, culture, medicine, corporate misconduct, and ordinary citizens caught in extraordinary circumstances.

60 Minutes did what a free press is supposed to do. It asked uncomfortable questions. It challenged the powerful. It gave viewers not opinion dressed up as fact, but reporting tested by facts. That is the ethical foundation of free speech: not merely the right to say what we want, but the responsibility to protect the institutions that seek the truth.

That is why the recent turmoil at CBS News feels less like another media shake-up and more like the slow dismantling of an icon.

According to news reports, Tanya Simon, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, along with senior journalists and correspondents including Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, were removed as part of a sweeping overhaul led by Bari Weiss, CBS News’s editor in chief.

Weiss was installed by David Ellison, the head of Paramount Skydance, after Paramount acquired The Free Press, the digital publication Weiss founded after leaving The New York Times. Her background was not traditional broadcast news, but opinion journalism and cultural criticism, much of it aimed at the failures and biases she saw in mainstream media. She was brought in not as a steward of the CBS News tradition, but as someone expected to change it.

Weiss replaced Simon with Nick Bilton, a technology journalist and filmmaker with no traditional broadcast-news background. CBS described the move as part of the need for a “new approach” in a changing media world.

But inside the offices of 60 Minutes, a clearer reality appeared to be taking shape.

According to reports, Scott Pelley confronted Bilton during a staff meeting and accused Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes. He questioned Bilton’s qualifications, Weiss’s judgment, and the firings that had taken place only days earlier — a day Pelley reportedly called “Black Thursday.”

“I care so deeply about this institution,” Bilton said.

“Oh, please,” Pelley interrupted.

Programs like 60 Minutes do not die all at once. They are chipped away, one editorial judgment at a time, until journalists stop asking only, “Is it true?” and begin asking, “Will it offend the wrong person?”

Free speech is not only the freedom to speak. It is the freedom of reporters to pursue the story, editors to defend the facts, and viewers to receive information not filtered through fear, ideology, access, or corporate caution.

That is the moral power of 60 Minutes. It has always understood that journalism is a public trust. And that is what appears to be at risk now. If it loses editorial independence, it loses the critical element that made 60 Minutes worth watching.

Edward R. Murrow understood that danger long before television became a corporate empire. In 1958, he warned that television could “teach,” “illuminate,” and “inspire” only if people were determined to use it that way. Otherwise, he said, it was “nothing but wires and lights in a box.”

For decades, 60 Minutes proved Murrow’s point. The ticking clock in the opening moments did more than announce the stories in that night’s broadcast. It signaled that something important was coming — reporting that might anger us, surprise us, move us, challenge us, or show us the world in a way we had not seen before.

Without independence, courage, and loyalty to fact, even 60 Minutes becomes only machinery: a clock, a camera, a logo, and a memory.

Now the clock seems to be asking a different question:

How long can an institution built on truth survive when outsiders are brought in not to protect its character, but to rewrite it?

At the end of Bilton’s meeting with the staff, according to reports, he said, “I just want to thank everyone for graciously being so welcoming… And enjoy the bagels.”

After he left the room, the 60 Minutes staff reportedly applauded Pelley.

Late last night, in a letter obtained by news organizations, Bilton terminated Pelley “for cause, effective immediately.”

That may have ended Scott Pelley’s career at CBS News. But it did something else as well.