What To Know
- Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes after a heated confrontation with new executive producer Nick Bilton.
- Pelley accused the new leadership, including Bari Weiss and Bilton, of trying to curry favor with the Trump administration.
- After 37 years at CBS, Pelley said he could no longer work under leadership that he believes has abandoned the program’s core values.
Scott Pelley has spoken out after his firing on Tuesday (June 2), accusing the new bosses of CBS News of trying to curry favor with President Donald Trump.
The veteran 60 Minutes correspondent was fired on Tuesday following a heated confrontation with the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, during a staff meeting. According to the New York Times, Bilton told staff that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss “loves 60 Minutes,” to which Pelley responded, “She’s murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place; she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”
Pelley is also said to have told Bilton he had “slender qualifications” for the job and blasted Weiss’ takeover of CBS Evening News. Hours after the report, Bilton sent Pelley a letter of termination “for cause, effective immediately.” Bilton accused the longtime reporter of “ambush” and “hijacking” the meeting to “disparage” him.
In his response, Pelley talked about the history of 60 Minutes, saying it has remained the number-one program in America because “our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories.”
He continued, “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.”
Pelley said the show “lost its DNA” last month “when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause.”
Weiss announced last week that the show’s executive producer, Tanya Simon, would be replaced by tech journalist and filmmaker Bilton. In addition, exec producer Draggan Mihailovich and correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were fired.
“Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience,” Pelley added. “They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.”
Pelley also claimed that the new management had “instructed” him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and to “include assertions that are unverified.”
“To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them,” he stated. “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.”
He said the “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management” has “wreaked havoc” at the show, noting how, “In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”
Pelley thanked the show’s viewers and longtime supporters, writing, “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.”
After 37 years at CBS, Pelley is stepping away, but he said his heart is “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.
He concluded, “I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.”