Years ago, I was interviewed by Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. He was old by then, but he was still an animal. In the scheme of broadcast investigative journalism, there was nothing to compare to 60 Minutes, the highest rated show on CBS, airing since 1968. After Wallace retired in 2006, the newsmagazine softened. Today, it’s grown into something fat and puffy, rarely pushing as hard as it did to force the unwilling to confront their improprieties. And then there was the puff piece segment, as the Heuer stopwatch ticked to a close, to fill the dead air after the football game or golf tournament pushed it beyond its time slot.

I used to watch 60 Minutes religiously. Nowadays, I check it out first to decide whether it’s worth it, and occasionally watch one or two segments. Still, it’s disappointing when Leslie Stahl fails to follow up a non-responsive answer with the in-your-face retort. Mike Wallace never would have let that go.

But the alternative to bad isn’t necessarily good. It can always get worse. And it did.

CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, jettisoning one of the network’s best-known journalists in a clash over the future of “60 Minutes,” the country’s top-rated news program.

Mr. Pelley, 68, a “60 Minutes” correspondent and a former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” joined the network in 1989. At a staff meeting on Monday, he accused the network’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” citing the ouster last week of the program’s leadership team and two on-air correspondents.

Anderson Cooper walked away. Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired. Then the new Executive Producer, Nick Bilton, whom the new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss hired to replace Tanya Simon, called a meeting to justify his existence. Scott Pelley was having none of it.

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

Mr. Bilton responded: “Well, I will show you. That’s what I have to say. That is my plan over the next two weeks. I’ll be meeting with everyone. I’m very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.”

The excitement didn’t last very long, as reflected in Bilton’s letter firing Pelley.

Like it or not. Weiss made Bilton the Executive Producer, which means he gets to fire people. Pelley was both insubordinate and unwilling to give Bilton a chance to do his job before attacking both him and Weiss for their lack of qualifications for their respective jobs and efforts to inject their politics into the broadcast where only the politics of the correspondents used to be.

On the one hand, Pelley deserved to be fired. On the other hand, Bilton had no business being made Executive Producer. On the third hand, 60 Minutes isn’t what it used to be. The old Mike Wallace/Harry Reasoner 60 Minutes left the building years ago. What remained was a shadow of its former self, a newsmagainze that took itself more seriously than it deserved while falling short of the blood and guts that distinguished 60 Minutes from everyone else on television.

And then there’s that problem with “on television.” Who watches broadcast TV anymore? Who gets their news from the national news anchors, who can’t seem to manage to actually inform between commercials and the vapid human interest segments?

“For me, the journalism is the journalism,” Mr. Bilton said, according to the recording. “That is why I am here. That is why we are all here.” He added: “The rumors people are spreading, that I’m going to turn the show into 60 one-minute episodes, that it’s going to be like TikTok, that is not changing. The show is going to stay exactly like it is for now.”

“For now” does a lot of heavy lifting, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to change. Being the highest rated show on broadcast TV is faint praise. It’s hard to blame Pelley for his antipathy toward Bilton and Weiss, and the changes made and almost certainly forthcoming to an institution like 60 Minutes. But his remedy should have been his resignation, not an attack on Bilton and Weiss who are no doubt on what they believe to be the path to the future, whether you agree or not.

Pelley was the biggest name left on the show, and his departure might have meant that 60 Minutes was dead either way. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what should happen and it’s time for 60 Minutes to come to its natural end. Maybe that’s because of Weiss and Bilton, or maybe it was just time.

Update: Pelley has issued a response to his firing.

There has never been anything in America like 60 Minutes.

The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58thseason, 60 Minutes grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.

“60” has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.

The waste is heartbreaking.

Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.

For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.

At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to “keep up the good fight.” Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.

I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.

Scott Pelley