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CBS News has fired longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley after he publicly assailed network leadership, breaking a “foundation” of trust, Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss told the newsroom Wednesday morning.
Weiss said the decision followed an explosive staff meeting on Monday in which Pelley accused her of “murdering ‘60 Minutes’” and declared that Nick Bilton, the tech journalist hired to run the program, would “never be welcome.”
“I’m only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect,” Weiss said on a 9 a.m. editorial call, according to a recording obtained by The NYTimes. “That foundation was broken on Monday.”
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Pelley was informed of his termination Tuesday evening. CBS News has not issued an official statement on the firing.
In a statement Wednesday, Pelley pushed back against Weiss’s version of events, saying there was “no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back.’”He met Tuesday with Weiss, Bilton, and CBS News President Tom Cibrowski. Pelley described the meeting as hostile and said the network showed little interest in addressing his concerns about the future of “60 Minutes.”
Pelley, who joined CBS in 1989, was enraged by Weiss’s recent decision to fire the top leadership team of “60 Minutes,” including longtime executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
At the Monday staff meeting — which Weiss did not attend — Pelley said Weiss had been “brought in to kill” the iconic program “and she’s been doing exactly that.” He also criticized Bilton’s lack of broadcast news experience, saying he had “slender qualifications for this job.”
Bilton later wrote in a termination letter that Pelley had “rejected” his attempts to meet and “chose ambush instead.”