Even before the meltdown inside CBS News, it’s been a banner seven weeks for the most egotistical profession in America: national reporters. Prior to this Ebola-level outbreak of Main Character Syndrome, these wannabe superheroes have reminded us of their importance between White House Correspondents Dinner shooting, the Pulitzer Prizes, the News Emmys, and the Peabodys.

Like Emperor Palpatine in “Revenge of the Sith,” the elite media in New York and Washington, D.C., want you to know that they alone are the First Amendment. We, the people, are an afterthought.

When Americans exercise their First Amendment rights and criticize the national press as “fake news” or even misleading, these theater kids act as though we’re threatening to murder them.

At Sunday’s Peabody Awards, ABC host Jimmy Kimmel kvetched, “We have the right guaranteed by the Constitution to criticize and satirize our leaders. This is a right that many of us take for granted.”

Whether it’s Kimmel, CNN’s Brian Stelter, or Jim Acosta, they seem to confuse a First Amendment right to a free and fair press with a God-given right to have a show and network that fits their worldview.

Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss has not turned CBS News into a competitor to the Fox News Channel or Newsmax. But like the media reporting class penning funhouse mirrors interpretations of Fox News, there’s no time to analyze what CBS newscasts cover.

Someone with “wrong” opinions has entered this leftist enclave and must be embarrassed. It sounds eerily similar to the anti-Semitism Weiss reportedly faced at the New York Times when she defended the placement of that infamous Tom Cotton op-ed.

At 60 Minutes, the moral of Sharyn Alfonsi’s firing last week could be slimmed down to the fact that mouthing off to your bosses with an “I-Am-Spartacus” e-mail will seldom work out for you.

Longtime CBS host and reporter Scott Pelley must have seen himself as Iron Man taking on Thanos, except the latter is former New York Times tech journalist and documentary filmmaker Nick Bilton, who was recently hired to man the stern of the 58-year-old show.

In other words, Bilton won’t be gracing the pages of this site.

But because he lacks TV news experience, he must be cast off as the staff he now oversees demands Americans open the floodgates for mass, Third World migration.

Pelley sought to do that by declaring to Bilton’s face he had “slender qualifications for this job” and was hired by Weiss, who is “murdering” the show and had “no qualifications for her job.”

The CBS mainstay even attacked Bilton for having the gall to show up at “our house,” even though “you would never be welcomed here.”

And that invective is without Bilton even explaining what he’d do at the show.

Unsurprisingly, Pelley’s lobs were reportedly met with numerous instances of applause.

The insubordination is stunning. There’s one set of rules the news media impose on the country, and another set of rules for themselves, including how we speak to our superiors.

Bill Owens — Pelley’s former longtime boss at 60 Minutes — accepted a highfalutin award called the Gabe Pressman Truth to Power Award from the New York Press Club last night and spoke of his former colleague as though he were the infamous man standing in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square.

Owens professed his admiration for Pelley, taking on Bilton and Weiss, “an opinion writer best known for being an ideologue.”

“Scott can smell a fraud from a mile away. He stood up the way I did a year ago and I couldn’t be prouder of him,” he boasted.

He added that shows like “60 Minutes” are “institutions, not places where partisans and ideologues should be employed.”

That’s laughable. It’d be interesting to see whether Owens finds stories such as celebrating cops visiting homes in Germany over social media posts or asking Israelis held hostage by Hamas if their captors were suffering from starvation alongside them.

And whether it was Steve Kroft’s years of pillow-talks with Barack Obama or Lesley Stahl decreeing the Hunter Biden laptop “can’t be verified,” the country’s leading newsmagazine has been a doormat for liberal narratives.

The arrogance and belligerence of these D-List Captain Americas and Black Widows are not to be believed.

Pelley and his fellow petulant children aren’t the only ones screaming for attention.

Karen Attiah also wants you to feel bad for her. On Monday, she announced that her September 2025 firing from The Washington Post for justifying Charlie Kirk’s assassination would be going to arbitration on Thursday.

Posting on — where else? — Substack, she said her message that day was merely “comment[ing] on America’s racial double standards in public discourse when it comes to political violence.” For that, she insisted, she “was fired…without so much as a conversation” and would be carrying into her hearing the “principle” of “newsroom diversity.”

Fact-check: False. Her definition of “newsroom diversity” means being Joy Reid with a pen and a right to cockamamie claims, such as Queen Elizabeth II being the personification of “white Christian supremacy” or Trump’s 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton being akin to “men stalking us on the street.”

“I am fighting for journalists’ rights to do their jobs, to comment on matters of public concern without fear of censorship, retaliation, or political pressure. And this is a battle well worth having,” she beamed, later concluding with “the stakes are high, but I’m ready” and then “let’s go” in bold.

Attiah even went as far as to pose outside The Washington Post’s K Street headquarters at night, illuminated in a blue dress while holding a rolled-up print edition and a fake red rose in her mouth.

Joan of Arc, she is not.

Never let elite, national reporters ever tell you they don’t want to or like being “the story.” It’s one of the biggest lies in America.

They are the heroes of their own tall tales and the captains of their own souls.

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Curtis Houck is the managing editor of NewsBusters.

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Don’t Ever Let Elite Media Tell You They Don’t Like Being ‘The Story’