Scott Pelley: 60-Minutes Free Of Front Office Interference

Veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley told an audience Thursday that the iconic CBS newsmagazine has experienced “no corporate interference of any kind” under Paramount’s new Skydance-led ownership, even after the company paid $16 million to settle a Trump lawsuit over a controversial Kamala Harris interview and committed to installing a news-division ombudsman.

Speaking while accepting the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism for his coverage of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against major law firms, Pelley directly addressed months of industry anxiety following the Paramount-Skydance merger and the abrupt departures of longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens and CBS News president Wendy McMahon.

Scott Pelley

“In that season last year, all of our stories got on the air,” Pelley said. “We got them all on the air with an absolute minimum of interference — nothing that anyone in this room would have been alarmed by. It’s early yet, but what I can tell you is we are doing the same kinds of stories with the same kind of rigor, and we have experienced no corporate interference of any kind.”

Pelley insisted editorial independence has remained intact so far this season.

The veteran anchor was blunt, however, about the human cost of the leadership upheaval, calling the exits of Owens and McMahon “heartbreaking” and describing them as “the most outstanding leaders in journalism I have ever known in my career.”In a lighter moment, Pelley reminded the crowd that threats to press freedom are hardly new, joking, “There was a time when freedom of the press was in worse shape than it is tonight — 1798, when the Sedition Act made it illegal to criticize the government.”