Former “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley suggested in an interview with The New York Times that CBS News parent Paramount Skydance remove Bari Weiss as the leader of the news division, alleging in an emotional exchange that “television’s not her thing” and that her inexperience with the medium and her belief that mainstream media is biased have undermined the journalism being produced by the venerable outlet.
“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,” Pelley said in an interview with 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.”
Pelley was fired by CBS News last week after a dramatic clash with Nick Bilton, who Weiss installed as the executive editor of the long-running newsmagazine following the removal of a significant chunk of the show’s senior staff and on-air correspondents. Among those ousted were former executive producer Tanya Simon; executive editor Dragaan Mihailovich; and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
In the interview, Pelley said Simon’s forced ouster affected him “like your spouse being murdered.” And he said “CBS News is on fire” in the wake of the gutting of the newsmagazine’s senior staff.
In the story, CBS News provided a statement that said Weiss had made suggestions on a specific Pelley story that was part of “the course of editorial back and forth” that “had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair and accurate as possible.” CBS News also called itself “a newsroom that operates with collaboration.”
A CBS News spokesman was not able to offer immediate comment on other parts of Pelley’s interview.
Weiss has presided over one of CBS News’ most tumultuous eras. She believes the news division is in a battle not only for its existence, but for new viewers, news aficionados and consumers who do not watch TV and want their information delivered via social and digital platforms. At the same time, CBS News’ shows — which include “CBS Sunday Morning” and “CBS Evening News” — are bedrock elements of a significant segment of news diets and generate millions of dollars in advertising and help bolster the distribution of CBS and other Paramount properties on cable systems and streaming venues around the world.
But Pelley argued that people at CBS News are well aware of the challenges of modern media. “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,:” he said in the interview. “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.”
When asked if Weiss should be removed from her post at CBS News, Pelley replied: “ Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, ‘There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.’ I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, ‘Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.’”
Pelley said it had been his intention to stay with the program in the wake of its recent overhaul, and that he believed the show’s three remaining correspondents — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim — had agreed to stay last week in a bid to keep “60 Minutes” alive. The correspondents “have had conversations before this about staying to maintain the principles of the broadcast. If we leave, we can’t help. There have been other times — when Anderson left, when others were fired — that we could have stormed into a meeting and quit, but those very distinguished correspondents and myself did have conversations about this and decided that we were better working on the inside, and that we could influence things for the better. And we did,” he said. “And it was my intention to stay and do exactly that.”
And he said his clash with Bilton was part of the decades-old culture at “60 Minutes,” where correspondents and producers defend stories and decisions with great passion. “I mean, was this meeting contentious?” he asked. “Yes, but ’60 Minutes’ is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.”
Pelley offered details of Weiss’ suggestions on a piece about the killings in Minneapolis of protesters against a crackdown by ICE, saying that he felt she wanted to put “a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.” And he suggested her “interference” after top editors had vetted the piece and in the time leading up to the broadcast of the episode in which the story was set to appear could have kept the piece off the air.
I think inexperience is the larger part of the problem,?” Pelley said. “the most difficult thing for the staff is trying to make up for all of these missteps in terms of our production and the technical aspects of television. It’s been enormously stressful.”