Veteran ‘’ correspondent Scott Pelley has released a lengthy statement after fired him on Tuesday, June 2, following a meeting with management in response to his criticism of the news magazine’s new leadership. This came after Pelley questioned and criticized newly appointed ‘60 Minutes’ executive producer Nick Bilton in a staff-wide meeting. His scathing comments leaked to news outlets outside, triggering a crisis inside CBS, CNN reported.
Pelley started his statement by saying, “There has never been anything in America like ’60 Minutes.’”
In his statement, Pelley blasted the new management, accusing it of instructing him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and including “assertions that are unverified,” The Wrap reported.
Scott Pelley’s full statement
Read Scott Pelley’s full exit note here:
“There has never been anything in America like ’60 Minutes.’
The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58th season, ’60 Minutes’ grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.
Read More |
’60’ has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.
The waste is heartbreaking.
Last month, ’60 Minutes’ lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.
For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over ’60 Minutes’ interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.
At ’60 Minutes,’ we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to ‘keep up the good fight.’ Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of ’60 Minutes’ is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.
I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.
-Scott Pelley”
What happened before Scott Pelley’s exit?
In a meeting on Monday, Pelley accused editor in chief of trying to “kill” the newsmagazine and objected to her hiring of Bilton, a former tech reporter with little TV news experience, to run the program. He had reportedly refused to meet with Bilton and Weiss privately to discuss last Thursday’s shake-up at ‘60 Minutes,’ which included the firings of top producers and two correspondents. On the same day, Bilton was appointed.
Read More |
Pelley at Monday’s staff meeting depicted Weiss and Bilton as unqualified for their jobs. He even said that Bilton would “never be welcome here,” per CNN.
The meeting ended without any clear resolution about the way forward.
On Tuesday evening, Bilton wrote to ‘60 Minutes’ staffers about Pelley’s exit, “I know how much Scott meant to many of you, and I don’t say this lightly. I made repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend, and this afternoon I tried to find common ground. That was not the path Scott chose.”
“I won’t relitigate the last week with you here,” Bilton added. “What I will commit to is this: My unyielding support for each of you, the journalism that you do and what we will do together going forward.”
