Free Speech Hero Bari Weiss Sh*tcans Scott Pelley From '60 Minutes' For Speaking Too Freely
'60 Minutes' will now be hosted by any Fox News anchors not already in Trump's Cabinet.
In another signature moment in the rapid unscheduled disassembly of CBS News, veteran 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley was abruptly fired Tuesday, one day after a staff meeting in which Pelley accurately accused new CBS News boss Bari Weiss of “murdering” the show.
During that meeting Monday, Pelley confronted new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton after a purge of the show’s top staff and two anchors, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. Bilton, a tech reporter, has never worked in broadcast news, so he’s clearly the perfect choice to advance the enshittification of the top-rated news magazine show.
Alfonsi, you’ll recall, reported the 60 Minutes segment about El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison that Weiss killed because it hadn’t given the administration the opportunity to lie at length about illegally sending immigrants there.
Bilton attempted in the meeting to reassure staff that all was well and that “The show is going to stay exactly like it is for now,” dismissing a rumor that he planned to water down the show and convert it into “60 one-minute episodes, that it’s going to be like TikTok.” In addition to shooting down the most hyperbolic, strawman version of concerns that he was there to bury the show, Bilton told staff that Weiss really truly “loves 60 Minutes,” which was apparently the last straw for Pelley, according to insiders and a recording of the meeting leaked to the media.
Pelley replied, “She is murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
He had more to say, too: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the Evening News have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
Because the ideal version of a free press is all about spirited debate of the issues, Bilton informed Pelley in a letter Tuesday that he’d been too damned spirited and principled and debatey and stuff:
We always love it when Trumpy stooges whine about civility and insist they just want to have a frank exchange of views, as long as everyone receiving the new diktat is open-minded enough to recognize that the future of the organization has been decided, and they recognize who’s the boss, and why their word is law. It’s like that Jonathan Colton song about the zombies taking over an office, “Re: Your Brains.”
All we wanna do is eat your brains! We're at an impasse here, maybe we should compromise. If you open up the door, we'll all come inside and eat your brains.
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After his firing, Pelley issued a statement on social media outlining CBS News’s slide from respected journalism into garbage status and accusing the new bosses at CBS News of trying to make him lie to viewers, all for the sake of trying to “curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”
It’s a pretty remarkable statement, worth nailing to the doors of a lot of executive suites and J-schools. Maybe it will wake up some people in the news business, we started writing before bursting into laughter and tears as we remembered the New York Times still exists.
Pelley lays out the particulars of what’s gone wrong at 60 Minutes, saying the program “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.”
Most worryingly, Pelley accused the new management of trying to interfere with reporting to make it more palatable to the only people who matter: Donald Trump and his sycophantic oligarch, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, who put Weiss in charge of gutting CBS News.
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.”
Pelley didn’t go into specifics, but we’re sure the details will come out as the new team’s mismanagement keeps wrecking the place. Pelley’s call to arms was noteworthy enough that MS NOW interrupted its primary election night coverage so Jen Psaki could read the whole thing on air:
As of yet, there have been no announcements from CBS or Paramount Skydance about further changes to 60 Minutes, but we’re sure they’ll be nauseating.
Hey, maybe The Onion could buy CBS?
[NBC News / Deadline / Guardian / Scott Pelley on Instagram]
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I think Pelley maneuvered Bilton and Weiss into firing him, and they are both too dim to realize how he played them. Pelley is nearly 69 years old. I doubt he needs the 60 Minutes gig, and in any case he has the credentials and clout to secure another one if he wants. He decided to take one for the rest of the team. CBS News could have let things calm down, refusing to take the bait that Pelley put out for them. But fools will always behave foolishly.
I think Weiss genuinely believes that she can be a savior at CBS and win more viewers by pivoting their coverage to the right. But that's delusional. It reflects a basic lack of understanding of how people consume news today. Fox viewers are not ever going to switch to watching a Fox Lite or even middle-of-the-road network because they're addicted to the rage-propaganda that Fox injects into them like junkies. Americans under 40 are not going to start watching the evening news on network TV. All Weiss has done is destroy CBS' core audience, and she's not bright enough to figure that out.
I know I shouldn't judge people by appearance alone, but you can look at this Bilton guy and tell he's a tech bro and a tool who not only doesn't know what he doesn't know but doesn't care to learn.
May he and Bari hitch a ride on Bezos' next exploding rocket.
It gets overused, but Weiss is a perfect example of Dunning-Kruger. She is impossible to convince that she's anything but a brilliant journalist and intellectual, bravely popping bubbles of ideological error in defence of truth. She is a mewling tell-tale and kiss ass, and because of this she will always be propped up by billionaires who like to have their arses kissed. She will flatter them, they will flatter her, neither will learn anything but neither will need to.