CBS Fires 60 Minutes Correspondent Scott Pelley After Newsroom Clash

CBS News fired Scott Pelley, one of the longest-serving correspondents on “60 Minutes,” on Tuesday night after a tense staff meeting a day earlier, NPR and PBS NewsHour reported. Nick Bilton, the program’s new executive producer, told Pelley it was for insubordination, according to NPR.

At Monday’s meeting, Bilton’s first with the show, Pelley called him unwelcome and unqualified and said Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor in chief, was attempting to “murder” the program, NPR reported. In the firing notice, which NPR obtained, Bilton wrote that Pelley had hijacked the meeting and rejected efforts to work constructively; PBS quoted the notice as citing “remarkable incivility and contempt.”

In a statement shared with NPR, Pelley accused the new news leadership of pushing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” PBS reported that he called the show’s leadership “no longer recognizable” and said the principles he held were gone, so he had to leave too. NPR said CBS had not yet publicly responded to his accusations. Weiss told staff in a meeting Wednesday morning that Pelley chose his own path by being fired rather than finding a way to work through his concerns, according to attendees quoted by NPR.

It was the latest dismissal. Last week CBS fired correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, executive producer Tanya Simon and others, NPR and PBS reported. Vega said in a statement that her team had “experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.” CBS said her claims were “not based in reality” while praising her work, NPR reported. Anderson Cooper left the network last month, NPR said, leaving Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim; NPR reported, citing two associates, that they were considering whether to resign.

The fight is also a fight over the network’s direction. Weiss was installed as editor in chief last October by David Ellison, whose family bought CBS’s parent company, Paramount, last summer, and who is now seeking approval from federal regulators to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN, NPR said. NPR described Weiss as a longtime critic of what she sees as mainstream media that is too reflexively anti-Trump, anti-Israel and “woke.” Bilton and Weiss say they respect the show’s legacy but that it needs an overhaul; NPR noted that the program’s ratings rose 9 percent over the past season under Simon.

Steve Kroft, a former “60 Minutes” correspondent, told PBS that the upheaval traces to a dispute over an interview with Kamala Harris, after which the Trump administration sued CBS for $17 million over an alleged illegal edit and Paramount settled. Kroft said the suit had “absolutely no merit,” yet Paramount settled for $17 million. He said the situation made no business sense for a company whose flagship program, he said, is the highest-rated news program on television. Those are Kroft’s views, as he gave them to PBS.

The show’s stars are now thin on the ground. With Pelley gone, only three correspondents remain, NPR said, at a program that has been among the most prominent and most profitable in broadcast news.