Scott Pelley Spills The Beans, Or The Tea, Or The Tea With Beans In It.

Believe it or not, Bari Weiss had a thumb on the scales!

Video screenshot, 60 Minutes on YouTube

Just a few days after being shitcanned for speaking too freely to the new boss (definitely not the same as the old boss), former 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley sat down with the New York Times “Interview” podcast (gift link) for his first interview since he was fired.

In the interview with reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro (yes, formerly of NPR), Pelley discussed in detail the turmoil and fuckery at CBS News wrought by Bari Weiss, and specifically the dismantling of 60 Minutes by Weiss and the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, neither of whom has any experience at all in television. (Worse, we keep misreading his name as “Nick Bitcoin.”) Pelley frequently grew emotional as he talked about the firings of his colleagues and the deliberately Trump-friendly direction Weiss is taking the news operation, because for Crom’s sake, he’s grieving the very real harm to his professional family and home. As the interview wrapped up, he joked, “Fox News is going to just run the parts where I’m crying and say I’m a lunatic.”

Pelley also answered one of the biggest questions from the statement he released immediately after his firing last week, in which he said the new management had “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” and that he was “told to include assertions that are unverified.”

That attempted interference involved a February 60 Minutes segment on ICE’s invasion of Minnesota that had already been okayed to go to air. Shortly before airtime that Sunday, well after the deadline for final edits, Weiss emailed then-executive producer Tanya Simon to demand two changes: that footage of protesters be changed to make them appear more violent, and to add narration that described Good as “driving toward the officer” who killed her. Pelley refused to make those changes.

If you have an hour to watch the full video of the interview, here it is. If not, we’ll write up the highlights!

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Throughout the interview, Pelley is gratifyingly critical of the changes being wrought at CBS News by the new team, but perhaps a little too gracious in attributing some of the fuckery not to malign intent, but to Weiss et al. simply being unfamiliar with television as a medium. He’s not making excuses, though; it’s more of a matter of seeing that Weiss has an agenda, but also that she’s in over her head.

Black Thursday, A Petty Email, And The Staff meeting From Hell

Pelley told Garcia-Navarro about the “Black Thursday massacre” the week before he was fired, in which Weiss ousted Tanya Simon and replaced her with Bilton, as well as shitcanning anchors Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi. (Alfonsi, you’ll recall, committed the sin of doing a journalism on CECOT, the infamous Salvadoran torture prison, without asking Trump administration flacks to please lie about how it was OK to ship immigrants there, apparently for life, with no due process.)

Pelley said that there was no warning of the firings, which came after a season in which 60 Minutes had grown its audience over the air and online — and winning two more Emmys just the night before the firings. “Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired.”

He pointed out that 60 Minutes staffers shared a bond similar to a family, especially considering that he and his colleagues “travel together. We dine together. We go into literal combat together. My former boss and former producer Bill Owens saved my life in a firefight in Iraq. So, these bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.”

Instead, Bilton sent a weird email days after the “massacre,” condescendingly informing everyone at the top-rated show on TV that “it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air.” Bilton appeared unaware that the show already had a significant online presence, as well.

Pelley and most of the remaining 60 Minutes staff were then summoned to a June 1 meeting where only Bilton, not Weiss, showed up, and Bilton simply got out his phone to read a statement to them about How It’s Gonna Be. No explanation of the firings, no sensitivity to the raw emotions of those left standing. “The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better.”

Pelley, the only anchor at the meeting since the others were out shooting stories, said he felt that as the most senior person in the room, it fell to him to say something about the firings and to “stand up not just for the broadcast but for the people. There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant.” The article notes that he teared up at that.

The next day, Pelley says he was called to a meeting by CBS News President Tom Cibrowski, who sent a casual-sounding note asking if Pelley could “come by and talk to us.” Cibrowski initially accused Pelley of “physically abusing” Bilton, which was a “firing offense.” When Pelley called that lie out, Cibrowski took it back — then almost immediately announced the meeting was over, without saying what would happen to Pelley, who says he had to wait four hours to get the actual word he was fired.

As for the idea that he was so unspeakably insubordinate that he was practically begging to be fired, Pelley replied with an anecdote about how open 60 Minutes used to be:

There was a screening once with Mike Wallace, and Mike and the executive producer and founder of “60 Minutes,” Don Hewitt, got into a big argument about a script. Wallace jumps up in the middle of the screening, throws his script up in the air and yells at Don, “Well then you write the effing thing!” One of those pieces of paper comes down and slices an associate producer across the face. He’s bleeding now. He’s got a paper cut on his face. That was about a story. The meeting that I was in was about whether “60 Minutes” was going to even survive.

See? Pelley really is frozen in the olden times, when anchors didn’t cower in fear of their bosses. It was anarchy in those days, and news is much better when there’s order, the anchors know their place, and everyone cooperates to produce a show Donald Trump can approve of.

The Minneapolis Story (Not Starring Jimmy Stewart, Kate Hepburn, Or Cary Grant)

Pelley also explained in detail how in February, Weiss tried to demand last-minute changes to a story about ICE in Minneapolis that had already gone through the usual process of editing and approval. The segment centered on an interview with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who was planning hearings on ICE’s operations and the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Pelley said he and his team had already bent over backwards to “identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively.” They had clips of ICE goons being yelled at, pelted with snowballs, and being chest-bumped by a protester. The segment also included the footage of Pretti kicking the taillight out of an ICE SUV 11 days before his murder, to make sure all the context was included.

The Sunday the segment was to go to air, it had been approved by all the higher-ups in advance of the show’s noon deadline, but then Weiss emailed Simon, the executive producer, to demand new changes:

“Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

Pelley reiterated that the segment already included some protesters’ least flattering moments, but “that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss.” And like some kind of Wonkette radical, Pelley pointed out that the ICE thug was well to the side of Good’s car, which had its wheels turned sharply away from him, but he shot her through her car’s window as she drove past (not over) him.

Pelley concluded, logically enough, that “The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.” He says that as the clock ticked down to airtime, he reviewed the segment with producers and a video editor, and confirmed that “the event was not as the president said and not the way Bari Weiss remembered it.” He decided not to make the changes Weiss wanted.

The day after, there was no reaction from Weiss, and Pelley said it even “occurred to me that maybe Bari Weiss didn’t see the broadcast and didn’t realize that those changes hadn’t been made.”

But his overall takeaway from the attempt at changing the narrative was that “There was 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.”

Oh, yes, and a CBS spokesperson told the Times there was nothing political about Weiss’s email, what are you talking about? She simply made some points “in the course of editorial back-and-forth,” and no, the spox didn’t say anything about all that happening well after the segment was vetted and approved.

Pelley closed out the interview by commenting on the statement from the three remaining 60 Minutes anchors — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim — that they will stay on at CBS. He said he hasn’t talked to them since he was fired, but assumes that they’re staying for the same reason he stayed after Weiss came on: “[We] have had conversations before this about staying to maintain the principles of the broadcast. If we leave, we can’t help.” But he also noted that may not count for much, because now “that trust is broken.”

Asked if he thinks Weiss should be removed, Pelley said, “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.”

He wished Weiss had had the good sense to reply to the job offer by saying “Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that,” which suggests he hasn’t read enough about Bari Weiss. She’ll fly that fucking plane into the ground with a smile on her face, all while insisting it’s a great day for freedom.

OPEN THREAD.

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Free Speech Hero Bari Weiss Sh*tcans Scott Pelley From '60 Minutes' For Speaking Too Freely

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