What’s Behind the Corporate Pillaging of “60 Minutes”

What’s Behind the Corporate Pillaging of “60 Minutes”

By firing veteran correspondent Scott Pelley, the leaders of CBS News have elevated toadying over truth-telling.

Former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, cashiered for the thoughtcrime of questioning Bari Weiss’s news agenda

(John Paul Filo/CBS via Getty Images)

CBS News used to be a place where reporters won Emmys and got raises for telling the truth. This week, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley got fired for it. At a staff meeting, the 68-year-old, 37-year-veteran of the network called out his new boss, executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley could not contain himself when Bilton said CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss “loves this institution. She loves 60 Minutes .”

Pelley interrupted with controlled fury. “She is murdering 60 Minutes ,” he said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Pelley went on: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. 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?”

To illustrate his point, Pelley listed the 60 Minutes staffers who had been fired on what is now known at their offices as Black Thursday. That day came in the aftermath of Weiss’s decision to stop the planned broadcast of a story on the brutal conditions at El Salvador’s Terrorism Containment Center (CECOT) where the United States sent Venezuelan migrants for detention after their apprehension by ICE. Weiss felt the story was not balanced, and sought to add a MAGA counterpoint to what 60 Minutes already felt was a balanced, finished piece. 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi publicly criticized Weiss’s decision and was fired.

“I have been a journalist for 25 years,” Bilton shot back. “I’ve sat across from incredibly powerful people like you have, and none of it intimidates me. OK? So you are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people.” Bilton then proved exactly how not-at-all intimidated he was by bringing Pelley’s outburst to the attention of Bari Weiss. Weiss accused Pelley of creating an unsafe work environment and insisted that he apologize. As this happened internally—an audio recording of the meeting was leaked to media outlets the day of the confrontation. What began as a closed-door shouting match between a reporter and a senior executive—a far-from-unprecedented occurrence in the history of journalism—went public as national news. It raised the stakes considerably. Of course, Pelley refused to back down. He meant every word of it. With his unapologetic criticism now public, CBS fired him.

Nothing says you won’t be intimidated like firing someone for criticizing you. Pelley spent nearly four decades at CBS, reporting, sitting at the anchor desk, and making it to 60 Minutes as a worthy successor to Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, and colleagues like Lesley Stahl. Pelley’s firing comes less than a week after Steven Colbert’s last episode aired and the affable, unremarkable Byron Allen has taken his place with his apolitical, sponsor-friendly show Comics Unleashed . It also comes as reports went viral that CBS News was trying to woo right-wing bro podcaster Joe Rogan over to 60 Minutes , in an attempt to connect with his vast listenership. (CBS now denies this .) A Rogan-branded 60 Minutes would be the journalistic equivalent of Trump building a UFC octagon arena on the White House lawn. In damage control mode, Nick Bilton contacted senior correspondents Lesley Stahl, Jon Wertheim, and Bill Whitaker to reassure them of journalistic independence . Given the last 18 months of CBS acquiescing to Trump, we’ll see how long this lasts. Why is all this happening at once?

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Yes, Pelley brought a level of reporting excellence and a historical relationship with 60 Minutes ’ audience that can’t be replaced—but in the Trump 2.0 era, those qualities are a hindrance, not a help. People like Pelley tend to feel they know what they’re talking about and question their bosses. Worse, other people listen to them—a definite bug, not a feature, for the MAGA model of public discourse.

In CBS’s brave new world, loyalty comes first—namely, the kind Weiss shows to her employers and not to her news division. As Pelley railed about Weiss’s lack of credentials in New York, Republican senators cited the same issue as they balked at at the news of Trump’s appointment of a new director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte. Pulte, 38, has no intelligence experience—a first-order disqualification in the past that roughly equates to a Harvard PhD for the country’s MAGA leadership caste. His chief qualification for the job is a singular loyalty to Trump—the same quality we saw on display from the CBS suits who gave Simon and Alfonsi the boot for their exposé on CECOT abuses and then dismissed Pelley for talking back to senior executives. It means not only d…