Scott Pelley went down swinging.
For that, he is being widely praised as a journalistic hero by the media-industrial complex.
And also widely mocked as a self-promoting phony.
Let’s face it, the onetime CBS anchor wanted to be fired – and made sure it happened.
He gave Bari Weiss and the program’s 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 you’ve 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 – and Weiss not at all – you are handing them the rope.
SCOTT PELLEY FIRED AT CBS NEWS AFTER BLOWUPS WITH BARI WEISS, NEW ’60 MINUTES’ PRODUCER
Weiss, in damage-control mode, told the staff “there must be trust and mutual respect…That foundation was broken on Monday, and despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways.
“We did not want that to happen, but that’s 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 British-born Bilton 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 Pelley’s a stiff,” President Trump told the New York Post. “And he’s afraid. And he’s part of this gang of stupid, crooked people that don’t care about our country.”
Let’s 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 that’s not true (she’s 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.
If you examine it from an if-it-ain’t-broke perspective, “60 Minutes,” across Manhattan’s 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 today’s fractured environment. And there’s been significant growth on the digital side.
So for an average viewer who doesn’t follow all the inside baseball, a lot of familiar faces are disappearing from the most successful news franchise in television history. It’s the show’s worst crisis since 1995, when CBS killed Wallace’s story on a tobacco whistleblower’s disclosures because it feared a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit.
In a lengthy statement after his exit, Pelley said “good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience…
“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,” 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 New York Times 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 raised in Lubbock, Texas, and worked in local television before joining CBS in 1989. He considered another Texan, Dan Rather, a mentor, but lacked the same cowboy swagger. Pelley’s demeanor has always been sober and serious.
He made his way up the ladder with such jobs as chief White House correspondent, and has won 51 Emmy Awards.
The political overlay is hard to miss. The new owners of CBS, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and his son David, are billionaire friends of Trump. In fact, they threw a private dinner to honor Trump in April, attended by Bari Weiss as well as Norah O’Donnell and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Their company obtained the administration’s approval to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a blockbuster deal.
Some at CBS believed the dinner projected an image of excessive coziness with the White House. But the Ellisons didn’t spend that kind of money without planning to make changes.
Reaction to this mess has been, well, pretty intense on both sides, as reported by Mediaite:
MSNOW host Rachel Maddow said “I made a crack there talking about the Scott Pelley news as being sort of Hungarian, oligarchic-style takeover of the media.”
Tim Miller, a onetime Republican spokesman who is fiercely anti-Trump, siad “60 doesnt have another Pelley in the pipeline talent-wise.”
Liberal commentator Harry Sisson said Pelley was battling “right wing grifters.”
Tommy Vietor, an Obama White House official, cracked: “Pelley seems to be attempting a murder/suicide. So far he’s halfway there.”
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On the conservative side, Outkick founder Clay Travis said: “Scott Pelley has been fired by ‘60 Minutes.’ Pelley will soon find out that no one else in media will come close to paying him millions a year to do a few stories a year. I think a lot of these old school TV guys are delusional about their market worth in today’s media.”
Newsmax host Rob Schmitt was dismissive: “Scott Pelley was a mid talent with an ego the size of Jupiter. Adios.”
Steve Krakauer, Megyn Kelly’s producer:”With Stephen Colbert and Scott Pelley now out the door at CBS, we’re seeing the systematic elimination of smug, old, straight, white guys who think they’re better than you.”
So Pelley departs in a swirling cloud of controversy – but I’m sure he won’t have trouble finding another job.
