Photo: CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Images
Scott Pelley, the longtime 60 Minutes correspondent, was fired on Tuesday, a day after confronting Nick Bilton, the program’s new leader, in spectacularly aggressive fashion in front of all their colleagues. Pelley met with Bilton and Bari Weiss on Tuesday afternoon, per a source familiar with the matter. In a termination letter to Pelley later that evening, Bilton lamented that Pelley had chosen to “ambush” him with “a performative display of hostility.” He added, “Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear.”
Pelley sealed his fate during a contentious meeting on Monday between the 60 Minutes staff and Bilton, audio recordings of which were obtained by multiple news outlets. Bilton was named executive producer of 60 Minutes last week, on the same day his predecessor, Tanya Simon, who had been with the program for more than three decades, was fired. Correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were also fired, as were Draggan Mihailovich, the show’s executive editor, and producers Guy Campanile and Matthew Poelvoy. The staff had taken to calling the culling “Black Thursday.”
Pelley essentially said aloud what many of his colleagues had been thinking following Bilton’s appointment: that he lacks the relevant experience to lead the news network’s crown jewel. Pelley on Monday said that Weiss was “murdering” 60 Minutes, had made “catastrophic” changes to the CBS Evening News, and has “no qualifications for her job.” He told Bilton, who has produced some documentaries, that he was only slightly better: “You have slender qualifications for this job.”
Bilton, a tech journalist formerly with Vanity Fair and the New York Times, said he was determined to prove himself. “The rumors people are spreading, that I’m going to turn the show into 60 one-minute episodes, that it’s going to be like TikTok, that is not changing. The show is going to stay exactly like it is for now,” Bilton reportedly said. In a letter to staff notifying them of Pelley’s departure, Bilton wrote, “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.”
Paramount CEO David Ellison tapped Weiss, the co-founder of the center-right Free Press, to lead CBS News last year, a move widely seen as a sop to the Trump administration as Ellison sought approval for a merger between Paramount and his production company Skydance. Trump had previously put 60 Minutes in his crosshairs by suing the show for an interview with Kamala Harris that he claimed had been deceptively edited. Staying in Trump’s good graces is a must: Paramount is now seeking regulatory approval for its $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.
The Weiss era hasn’t been a smooth transition. In December, Weiss pulled a 60 Minutes segment about the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrants to a Salvadoran prison, which had been reported by Alfonsi. Alfonsi called the decision “political.” Weiss’s choice to lead Evening News, anchor Tony Dokoupil, has struggled to lift its low ratings. And now the blowup with 60 Minutes, which remains widely watched and respected, threatens to create more unexpected headaches for Ellison, whose hands are tied until the Paramount-WBD merger is finalized.
There are now only three correspondents left at 60 Minutes: Jon Wertheim, Lesley Stahl, and Bill Whitaker. In addition to losing Alfonsi, Vega, and Pelley, the show is now without Anderson Cooper, who departed recently after 20 years. More could follow. At one point in the Monday meeting, Bilton reportedly told Pelley, “They’re my colleagues too.” Pelley responded, “That remains to be seen.”
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