Defining who you are in challenging times: A storied journalist shares his insights

60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley addresses a packed crowd at Learn Serve Lead: The AAMC Annual Meeting on Nov. 9 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Credit: Kaveh Sardari

Samer Attar, MD, an orthopedic surgeon from Chicago who turned a cave in Syria into an operating room for war-wounded civilians. Yuriy Kuznetzov, MD, a Ukrainian surgeon who stayed behind as many of his colleagues fled Russian troops' invasion. Volodymyr Zelensky, comedian-turned-wartime-president of Ukraine. The firefighters who responded to the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

These are people who, in moments of crisis, had to decide who they were.

Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes correspondent and former anchor of the CBS Evening News, highlighted these out of the countless stories of bravery and resilience that he has documented over his nearly 50-year journalism career during the opening plenary session of Learn Serve Lead 2024: The AAMC Annual Meeting on Nov. 9 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Pelley shared moving clips from his interviews, taking place from studios to war zones, tearing up as he recalled his experience at Ground Zero when the twin towers collapsed.

"[These are] all people who were leading some other life when one of the great events of history occurred and they instantly had to make a choice: Who are you?" Pelley said to a packed crowd of thousands of attendees. "Ladies and gentlemen, after meeting all these people all around the world in so many circumstances, it finally occurred to me that I had been asking the wrong question all along. Don't ask the meaning of life. Life is asking, what's the meaning of you?"

It's a sentiment Pelley wanted to emphasize after reflecting on the results of the election that took place just four days earlier, surprising many with sweeping victories for Republicans, including the re-election of former President Donald Trump.

"Ninety percent of the counties in the United States shifted to the right on Tuesday," Pelley said. "In a nutshell, it was inflation. That's what voters have told us in CBS exit polls."

Pelley added that about 15 million Democrats who voted in 2020 did not show up to the polls this year.

"We will be chewing over this for a very long time," he said.

Later, during a conversation with moderator Susan Cato, AAMC chief communications and marketing officer, Pelley emphasized that, in a time of polarizing politics in the United States, it's important to have openminded conversations with those with whom we disagree.

"I think we make a mistake when we try to win an argument or win a conversation," he said. "In my view, winning is losing because both sides have stopped listening to one another. I would recommend, if you're going to have a potentially contentious conversation, start with, 'I'm really interested in hearing what you have to say.' Well, boy, that changes the landscape entirely."

He also spoke of the importance of a free press that strives for objective reporting and the need for consumers of information to seek out credible news sources, including from outlets that don't reinforce their existing ways of thinking.

"I have the opinion that there is no democracy without a free press and free speech," Pelley said. "It can't be done because all of us have to have solid information from a variety of viewpoints."

Pelley acknowledged the current tension and divisions in the country, but pointed out that division has always been a part of U.S. history.

"There's no denying that the general direction of our country has been toward progress. We've never been better off in so many ways," he said. "[There's] much to do, but never better than we are today."

Three weeks before the session, AAMCNews spoke with Pelley about lessons learned from his reporting, understanding our current political landscape, and how to move forward.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your book, Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter's Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times you chose to share your story through highlighting the importance of various virtues and the search for meaning. Why did you decide to focus your book on these messages?

Well, after working in journalism all around the world for all of these decades, I realized I had met people who discovered the meaning of their lives in some of the great historic events of our time. And in each and every one of these people, there were lessons to be learned about virtues and values and the meaning of life. And so I organized my book around those ideas, to use each of these individuals as an example of the highest ideals for humanity, and a few in there as cautionary tales, from people who took the wrong path.

The theme of your talk at the conference is about seeking solutions amid disorder. And as you know, we're a couple weeks shy of the presidential election as we speak, and once we're in Atlanta, the election will already have happened. You have spoken about a "cold civil war" in the United States. What do you mean by that? And how do you think we got to the point where we're at now?

I think a number of events have brought us to where we find ourselves today. There is growing economic disparity in the country, particularly between those who have college educations and those who don't. Inflation has exacerbated that to a great degree. Also, the COVID-19 pandemic changed our culture in many ways, some of which I think we're only really beginning to realize are enduring in their importance. And finally, the political parties themselves - both of them have taken on a rhetoric that is almost evangelical in its nature, so that the parties have placed themselves in the position of being quasi-religious organizations, in my view. And when you have set up an orthodoxy, you really can't compromise on that. You can't reach out to the other side and accept part of what they're doing. And so there is an orthodoxy in our politics that is new, at least in my generation, and one that separates the country into us and them, depending on which side you're on.

You've also spoken about what you call digital citadels, where people consume information. As a journalist, what do you think can be done to improve the way people consume and communicate news and information?

You know, we used to live in a country that had shared media. By and large, all Americans saw the same things on television and read the same things in the newspapers and what have you. We don't have that anymore. We have an atomized media, where everyone can isolate themselves in a digital citadel and be told all day long that what they already believe is correct. And that's a very seductive thing. We all like to be told that what we already believe is correct, that we needn't think any more than we have, and that our beliefs needn't be challenged in any way. That's a terrible thing for a democracy. The fastest way to destroy a democracy is to compromise the information, and we are now living in a multimedia, social media world where the information is being compromised.

I think it is an inflection point, for our country in particular and for democracies in general, to see whether they can survive this period in which so much of our information is misinformation and disinformation, and it's left to the reader to sort that out and to challenge themselves to look for other perspectives that might help inform their opinions.

How do we get past this? Well, first of all, we continue to fight for responsible journalism, the kind of work that you're doing, the kind of work that we're doing at 60 Minutes, where we try to make sure that our stories are right. By that, I mean factually correct. To make sure that they're right and they're fair and they're honest, and to give Americans a place to go, or many places to go, where that journalistic ethic is still healthy and vibrant. But the other half of that is - and I always say to audiences, "I'm sorry that you have to do this now" - but it's up to the individual to triangulate their information. Now if you read something and you think, "Gosh, did that happen?" or "Did that person actually say that?" Well, now you have to go online and ask, "Well, what did the New York Times say about that incident? What did the Los Angeles Times say about it? What did the Wall Street Journal or CBS or ABC or NBC say about it?" So that you can triangulate the information and come to your own conclusion about whether that thing was correctly and fairly reported. I doubt many people will want to do that kind of work, but democracy from this point forward is going to be a lot of work, and if we value it, then we have to value the quality of our information. And now that's really up to the individual to ensure that they're receiving quality information.

The AAMC has engaged on the issue of freedom of speech at previous conferences, and it is often contentious, particularly when some people feel strongly that another's viewpoint is morally reprehensible or objectionable in some other way. What have you learned in your career and personal life about navigating discourse with people that one perceives to be malicious, and how can that be balanced with freedom of speech?

The most important key to all of it, I think, is listening, and listening in an honest way. Actually listening, not just standing there thinking about what your reply is going to be as soon as the other person stops talking, which is typically what human beings do. Listening for areas of common ground and rephrasing what the person just said to you: "What I hear you saying is …" and then rephrase in an honest way, and then make your argument following that.

The problem, I think, in the political discourse in this country is we're not listening anymore. We have reached this orthodoxy on both sides that forces us to believe that the other person is just wrong, and therefore there's no reason to listen to what they have say, and you can't have a democracy that way. That's the end of the country right there, when people stop listening to each other and stop giving people credit for those things on which there can be common ground.

There are a lot of reasons I'm excited about speaking to the [AAMC], one of which is that the scientists in the medical community and those of us in journalism have one very profound thing in common, and that is the scientific method. Journalism, when practiced at its best, is following the tenets of the scientific method: We come into something and we say to ourselves, "We don't care what the answer is; we just care what the data show, and the data we will follow to the answer." We don't have a thumb on the scale of how we want this to turn out. And so, when science follows the scientific method, which, of course, isn't always true, but when it does, it reaches the right conclusions. And when journalism follows that method, it reaches the right conclusions as well. And I think people in all walks of life could benefit enormously from following the tenets of the scientific method.

What do you think is the role of the people who make up academic medicine in fostering the unity that you discuss across ideological divides?

In the mental health space, they have an enormous responsibility to help do what we do in journalism, and that is to open minds, not close them. That is the tenet, really, that drives my work. [It's] the idea of opening minds and not settling on one side or the other, but helping people realize that there are reasonable and even correct views [that are different from our own] - helping people realize that their views are not the only reliable and reasonable views that are out there. So, in the mental health space in particular, I think the medical community has an enormous responsibility there.

You know, one of the reasons that I accepted the speaking opportunity with enormous gratitude was [because I can't think of] what is better in humanity than medical education. I mean, seriously, name it. Tell me what's more important in humanity than medical education to relieve the suffering of people all around the world. I can't think of what it might be. And so, this is an opportunity for me to learn and to be associated, if only briefly, with this community for which I have so much admiration. What I hope to do is to talk about whatever's happening in the election at that moment. It could be all about Georgia at that very moment, but also [I hope] to relate some of these stories from the book, to talk about values, to talk about people who discovered the meaning of their lives in a moment that they never saw coming, and to talk about how those things can inform our body politic today and help us reach out and begin to communicate with one another.