Scott Pelley Speaks Out After Getting Fired From ’60 Minutes’
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 issued a statement on social media and 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.”
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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.”
Conversation14 Comments
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A
Let me add Harry Reasoner to the other late "60 Minutes" veterans that I previously mentioned as turning over in their graves over the direction of their-once-revered program: Mike Wallace, Don Hewitt, Morley Safer, and Ed Bradley.
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C
And Andy Rooney.
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M
He’s not wrong. Bari the bootlicker was brought in to destroy 60 Minutes and CBS News. She’s succeeded. Now, instead of having factual, sourced news without commentary and opinion, it’ll be another Faux News (who went to court and said they were not a news station). The biggest mistake was allowing foreign billionaires with an agenda to buy up American companies. Not exactly America first now, but that line is just that, a line. The party that lies about a 6’3” 235 lb POTUS in better health than an athlete (😂) surely wouldn’t lie about anything else, right?
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G
Just that Joe Biden was "running circles around his staff"; except now even "Dr." Jill admits she thought Joe was having a stroke the night of the debate. 60 minutes stopped being a news organization...even in this article the people talking keep saying they are "telling stories".
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K
Scott Pelley spoke the truth. Our freedom of speech is in jeopardy every day.
Its time people woke up to the fact that this country is the laughing stock of the world .
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S
He spoke the truth as a liberal sees it. In other words he didn't speak the truth.
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M
Journalism in the United States is a thing of tthe past.
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J
Maybe it will return as part of "project 2029." (If not before!)
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L
If you can't voice your honest, even if adversarial, feelings/ideas to your boss without them firing you virtually on the spot, they should be fired; 'cuz they certainly don't know how to be a good boss, never mind a great one. But of course, all bets would be off when a boss is hired not to encourage & enhance, but to execute with extreme prejudice.
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G
Like the far left...enough with their "feelings". I want truthful news in an unbiased manner...just the facts. No more activists as they said, "telling stories".
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L
LOL, so people on the far right have no feelings? Feelings are a kind of fact, but that's not the issue news-wise. Pelley was not reporting the news on TV; he was sitting in a staff meeting. He was talking about the integrity of the show; & had not only the right but the responsibility to address it. If you saw someone come into your workplace apparently attempting to backrupt it, I should hope you would have the courage to speak up about that, including how it makes you feel. As for the "telling stories" jargon, what makes you think real stories about real people and real situations are all fiction? If you choose to tell me a story about, I dunno, how someone's road rage almost caused your shotgun passenger to be broadsided & killed in a traffic accident, should I preemptively dismiss that as "fake"? Or should I listen to you respectfully, even if I question whether you interepreted it correctly? Of course, if I could see by your description that you're lying about it for insurance fraud, then I should speak up. But not throw you out of my car while it's in motion. And certainly not gloat as you then get run over by the car in the next lane.
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F
All of these multimillionaires pretending to be on white horses looking out for us little guys. Arrogant, ill informed, and isolated from the lives we lead. Cry me a river over poor Scott. Their pandering to the left while ignoring and insulting the other half of the country is going out of vogue (note dismal ratings and competition from the Internet), and the people that write their paychecks are just now realizing it.
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J
He can leave quietly or raise a stink. If he chooses the latter and persists, he will lose.....
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S
60 minutes turned into a liberal propaganda machine. Good riddance to Scott Pelley!
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