CBS Fires Scott Pelley After Heated 60 Minutes Exchange

In a dramatic late-night sacking of a network news icon, CBS News has fired veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. The move comes one day after Pelley confronted Nick Bilton, the venerable newsmagazine’s newly-installed executive producer, over concerns Bilton and Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of the division, were trying to destroy the show from within (or, in his words, “murdering” it.) In a letter to Pelley obtained by Vulture, Bilton claimed Pelley had “hijacked my first meeting with staff” and demonstrated “remarkable incivility and contempt,” adding that a follow-up meeting he had with Pelley Tuesday demonstrated there was no “common path” for the two men. Bilton then went on to argue Pelley—who spent nearly four decades at the network, including a stint anchoring the CBS Evening News—had displayed an “antipathy to the future” of 60 Minutes and was thus being “terminated for cause effective immediately.”

The decision to dump Pelley comes less than a week after Weiss shook up the most successful program produced by CBS News, firing respected executive producer Tanya Simon, pink-slipping several other correspondents and producers, and hiring Bilton, a print reporter-turned-documentary filmmaker with zero hands-on experience making TV news. While Bilton and Weiss have described these moves as being aimed at expanding and future-proofing the 60 franchise, Pelley and, per multiple reports, wide swaths of the surviving 60 staff, are worried the goal is to de-fang the show, which has repeatedly drawn the ire of President Trump.

Speaking to the New York Times shortly after news of his firing was made public, Pelley seemed gobsmacked by the idea expressed by Bilton that he had demonstrated “antipathy” toward the show’s continued survival. “I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” he told the paper. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”

But in a letter to 60 staff obtained by Vulture, Bilton, while noting he knew “how much Scott meant to many of you,” seemed to suggest that Pelley had left him with no choice but to fire him. “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,” Bilton said, adding that he wouldn’t “relitigate” what happened at Monday’s staff meeting. “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.” Assuming, of course, those staffers don’t emulate Pelley and strongly and sharply disagree or challenge their boss in an internal staff meeting.