The evisceration of ‘60 Minutes’ greases the skids for David Ellison’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery

Nicholas von Hoffman and James Kilpatrick debate the fate of Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal in 1973.

I’m nearly 70, and I’ve never been a regular viewer of “60 Minutes.” I think of it as a show that my parents watched. Still, the dismantling of the highly rated program at the hands of David Ellison’s designated flunky, Bari Weiss, and her designated flunky, Nick Bilton, has been alarming for anyone who cares about investigative journalism — or, for that matter, democracy.

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I had to laugh at the clueless outrage of conservative commentators over Scott Pelley’s wonderfully hostile confrontation with Bilton. “When a child throws a tantrum, they’re punished,” clucked Isaac Schorr at Mediaite. “When a journalist throws a tantrum, they wait to be called stunning and brave.”

In a similar vein, former Trump communications guy Alex Pfeiffer posted on Twitter that no one other than a celebrity journalist like Pelley would think he could get away with such an outburst. “Why do journos think they are exempt from common decency?” he asked. “I don’t think there is any other industry where workers think they have the right to berate their boss in front of coworkers. If Pelley gets fired for this, all the usual suspects will clutch their pearls.”

What eludes crack detectives Schorr and Pfeiffer is that Pelley had already decided it was over when he told Bilton that Weiss was “murdering” “60 Minutes,” that Weiss had “no qualifications” to be running CBS News, and that Bilton had “slender qualifications” to be put in charge of “60 Minutes.” At that point, Pelley knew he was either going to quit or be fired, and he decided to go out in a blaze of glory. Give him credit for getting his money’s worth.

We all have something in common with Weiss: We don’t know what she’s doing, and neither does she. “Bari Weiss has been pilloried by liberal press, seeing her as a crazy right-winger (untrue),” Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz tweeted the other day.

Kurtz is right that it’s untrue, but he’s wrong that the “liberal press” has portrayed her as “a crazy right-winger.” Weiss, as has been reflected in nearly all the coverage, is one of those right-of-center, anti-anti-Trump types, contrarian in ways that she thinks are clever but that most of us find tiresome.

Weiss may think she’s on some sort of ideological mission, but her benefactor, David Ellison, is clearly hoping that CBS News becomes Trump-friendly enough for him to win approval to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, whose holdings include CNN. (You think CNN is bad now?) Yet Ellison is surely more interested in WBD’s entertainment properties than he is in CNN, just as what attracted him to buying CBS’s parent company, Paramount, were its movie, music, television and theme-park businesses. In other words: Ratings don’t matter.

I remember sitting down on Sunday evenings with my parents to watch liberal commentator Nicholas von Hoffman and conservative James Kilpatrick square off in the weekly mini-debate that closed “60 Minutes.” It was called “Point-Counterpoint.” Von Hoffman was later replaced by Shana Alexander, which led in turn to the famous “Saturday Night Live” parody in which Dan Aykroyd, as the Kilpatrick character,” turned to Jane Curtin and blasted her with “Jane, you ignorant slut!”

Well, it took nearly 60 years, but Kilpatrick finally won.

Correction: Shana Alexander’s name now fixed.