Scott Pelley went down swinging.
For that, he is being widely praised as a journalistic hero by the .
And also widely mocked as a self-promoting phony.
Lets face it, the onetime CBS anchor wanted to â and made sure it happened.
He gave Bari Weiss and the programs new boss, tech journalist Nick Bilton, not the slightest opening for trying to work together to see how it goes.
Once you accuse Weiss, the editor-in-chief, of “murdering” the show youve been on for more than two decades, you are in full bridge-burning mode.
Once you confront your new boss, Bilton, by calling him minimally qualified â and Weiss not at all â you are handing them the rope.
Weiss, in damage-control mode, told the staff “there must be trust and mutual respectâ¦That foundation was broken on Monday, and despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately we werent able to do so, and so we had to part ways.
“We did not want that to happen, but thats the path that he chose. That unfortunate outcome does not discount from the amazing contributions and work that Scott Pelley has done for CBS and for 60 Minutes over the course of his career.”
The got his revenge in a blistering letter to Pelley:
“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt.” He called this a “performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff.”
Pelley, for his part, says the new management has already handled some of his stories unethically.
At least one person was pleased. “Look, Scott Pelleys a stiff,” President Trump told the New York Post. “And hes afraid. And hes part of this gang of stupid, crooked people that dont care about our country.”
Lets pull back the camera. Weiss has fired correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vegas and executive producer Tanya Simon. Anderson Cooper quit to return full time to CNN. (And the “CBS Evening News” has been a ratings disaster under anchor Tony Dokoupil.)
The left caricatures Weiss as a crazy conservative, though thats not true (shes more of a moderate liberal with some right-leaning views). But she and Bilton, who have worked together in the past, both have no TV experience.Â
If you examine it from an if-it-aint-broke perspective, “60 Minutes,” across Manhattans 10th Avenue from the main building, produces $200 million in advertising revenue for the network. Its ratings are up 9 percent from last year. After 58 seasons, dating back to Mike Wallace and Morley Safer, it is averaging 9.1 million weekly viewers, an impressive figure in todays fractured environment. And theres been significant growth on the digital side.
So for an average viewer who doesnt follow all the inside baseball, a lot of familiar faces are disappearing from the most successful news franchise in television history. Its the shows worst crisis since 1995, when CBS killed Wallaces story on a tobacco whistleblowers disclosures because it feared a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit.Â
In a lengthy statement after his exit, Pelley said “good people were silenced because they stood up for our audienceâ¦
“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. Ive been told to include assertions that are unverified,” though he has managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.”
And there was this: “In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”
Pelley told the on Tuesday: “I have been in combat in
Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”
Yet that brought him some ridicule because he was not actually “in combat,” nor was that his job.
Pelley, 68, was
