FCC boss Brendan Carr went after journalist Scott Pelley for claiming in his recent New York Times profile that it “hadn’t occurred” to him that he would be fired from “60 Minutes.”
“One of the reasons why trust in media is so low is because many legacy journalists are completely out of touch,” Carr wrote on X Sunday morning. “You could not get away with that behavior at any run of the mill job. It is revealing to see how blind some are to that.”
By “that behavior,” Carr means Pelley’s recent and very public distaste for the new regime at CBS News and “60 Minutes.” It was reported that on May 25, Pelley lashed out at the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, telling the former NYT tech columnist that he had “slender qualifications” for his job. Bilton was recruited to “60 Minutes” by CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, whom Pelley accused of “murdering” the show through her leadership during the same meeting.
On June 2, Bilton released a letter claiming that CBS News and Pelley failed to reconcile, and that Pelley was fired from “60 Minutes.”
“Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear,” Bilton wrote. “And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated effective immediately.”
Elsewhere in his NYT interview, Pelley suggested that Paramount-Skydance, the parent company of CBS News, needs to remove Weiss as editor-in-chief. Pelley alleged that “television is not her thing,” and that “60 Minutes” is in desperate need of “adult supervision.”
“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,” Pelley told the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “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.”