CBS used to have one of the best news divisions on television, and 60 Minutes was CBS’s signature news program, and one of the most-watched news shows in the country. But CBS was taken over by right-wingers, who installed some of the dumbest and most conservative people to destroy CBS News from within. Well, some of the 60 Minutes journalists and producers have been trying to fight back or let people know what’s happening. Anderson Cooper got the hell out of there in a hurry because he saw which way the wind was blowing. Scott Pelley chose a different route: publicly calling out CBS’s leadership and their clear interference in the news division. On Tuesday, Pelley was dramatically fired after “ambushing” 60 Minutes’ new executive producer.
Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley has been fired from CBS following a heated confrontation with the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, who accused the longtime journalist of “ambush,” “hostility” and “misconduct” in a striking termination letter obtained by PEOPLE. In the letter, which is signed by Bilton, Pelley is informed that his employment with CBS has been “terminated for cause effective immediately.”
“It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead,” the letter states. “Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt.”
The letter continues by accusing Pelley of showing “performative display[s] of hostility” and having “no interest in contributing to the future success of the show….I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama,” the letter claims. “I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.”
“Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear,” the letter later adds. “And I have heard you.”
The firing comes after Pelley allegedly clashed with Bilton during a tense staff meeting at 60 Minutes, according to The New York Times and The Guardian. According to those reports, Bilton told staff that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss “loves 60 Minutes,” prompting Pelley to respond: “She’s murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place, she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that. She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job,” Pelley reportedly continued, according to The New York Times. “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?”
Bilton reportedly 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.”
This makes me want to rewatch The Insider, a terrific movie about how CBS bungled and buried a huge 60 Minutes story about the cigarette industry, only to be publicly ripped to shreds by Mike Wallace and 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, who leaked what happened behind-the-scenes. The reason that worked is because everyone understood that a network’s corporate owners should not and cannot interfere with their news divisions. That understanding is dead. Pelley was right to speak up in the meeting and everything he said was factual – Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were absolutely brought in to destroy 60 Minutes and CBS News entirely. After Pelley was fired, he wrote a scathing exit letter, which I’m posting in its entirety below:
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 58th season, 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.
As I said, Anderson Cooper’s exit from 60 Minutes last month was telling – he absolutely saw the wreckage of CBS News and got the hell out. As Pelley says here, there are still many people within the news division who are great journalists, researchers, producers, etc. We’ve witnessed the hostile takeover of a network news division, all because CBS’s corporate owners would rather remake the news division into a propaganda arm for American fascism.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
