Last week, Scott Pelley was dramatically fired from 60 Minutes after he questioned the leadership of CBS News’ editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and the newly-installed 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton. He questioned their leadership and the mass-firings within a staff and editorial meeting. Weiss lied about what happened around Pelley’s firing, and Bilton’s statement about Pelley’s firing absolutely leaves Pelley with a good case for wrongful termination. Several days after Pelley was fired, he sat down with the NY Times Magazine to discuss what happened around his termination, and what has already happened within the culture of CBS News. I’m including the video at the end of this post, and here are some of the most significant quotes from Pelley:

Confronting Nick Bilton at a staff meeting: “It was behind closed doors. I was with my family in a closed room. None of this was meant to be public. Imagine I’m walking into this room with these people who have devoted their lives to “60 Minutes.” They have not received any kind of explanation. They are waiting for Bari Weiss to walk in the room in the hope that she’s going to explain why this tragedy has occurred and why it was so necessary. I’m waiting to see who comes in and it’s Nick Bilton and one of Bari’s deputies. No Bari. People are a little shocked by this. As we’re standing in there, Nick makes his way to the front of the room and does something absolutely jaw-dropping to me. He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people. The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better.

What happened before the confrontation: “What happened a couple of days before the meeting was so critical. Nick Bilton wrote an email to the staff, introducing himself. And it was so insulting. He told us that it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved. He said in his email that it was “strange” that “60 Minutes” is only on the air at 7 o’clock Eastern time on Sunday once a week, when we’ve been on the air 24-7 globally, online, for well over a decade. It betrayed the fact that Nick Bilton didn’t know anything about us, didn’t know anything about our culture, and yet was being imposed on us as our new leader.

Whether he expected to be fired after the staff meeting: “Oh gosh, furthest thing from my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me. The president of CBS News, Tom Cibrowski, sent me a note and said, can you come by and talk to us? And I said, absolutely. I scheduled about an hour on my calendar for the meeting. I didn’t know who was going to be there.

The mood in Tom Cibrowski’s office: “Hostile, dismissive. Before I can take my seat, Tom Cibrowski said, this is a firing offense. So I sit down, like, OK, let’s talk about it. Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie. I didn’t come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, well, OK, I take that back. And I said, great. So I’m thinking that the meeting’s going to carry on. We’re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned. I didn’t have a 60-minute stopwatch in that room. I don’t know how long it lasted really, but I think it was about 10 minutes.”

He accused Bari Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into his ICE story. That’s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We’ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he’s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened — the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively…. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer. This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.”

Why Weiss interfered in 60 Minutes editorship: “I need to be a little bit careful here because I don’t want to be hyperbolic. My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough. [A CBS News spokesperson disputes this characterization, writing, “There is no credible argument to suggest Ms. Weiss was ‘putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration’ in any instance over the past seven months.”]

Weiss & Bilton live in the 1990s: “Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous. It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is. At CBS News, yeah, join the fight. We started our first “60 Minutes” online show, “60 Minutes Overtime,” in 2010. I shoot TikTok verticals, or I used to shoot TikTok verticals on every assignment. We’re there. We’re everywhere.

His hope for CBS: “My hope is that the leadership of Paramount will say to themselves, this isn’t working. We have broadcasts that almost don’t get on the air. We have respected journalists saying that there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over another. We have a broadcast that is among the most important in America. The most successful in the history of all television. It was doing great, so why are we making these changes? We need adult supervision and at the moment we don’t have it. We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at “60 Minutes” before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”

[From The NY Times]

Pelley is so straight-forward and so much of an old-school journalist, it’s refreshing. But it’s also telling because… he’s an intelligent man who still believes in the rule of law, and the rules of the newsroom. He didn’t see his termination coming because he didn’t recognize the threat of this hard right-wing takeover of network news, nor did he seem to recognize how thoroughly everything changed when Donald Trump came back into office. He honestly thought that 60 Minutes would be safe, or that CBS News would still operate like usual. I’m not blaming him but it’s interesting that so many journalists seem to have their blinders on about what’s actually happened to this country in recent years.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, screencaps courtesy of the NYT YouTube video.