Days after being fired from CBS News, former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley is opening up about the chaos at the news organization under the leadership of editor in chief Bari Weiss, president Tom Cibrowski, and corporate owner David Ellison.
“My hope is that the leadership of Paramount will say to themselves, this isn’t working,” Pelley told The New York Times in a lengthy interview posted online on Sunday. “We have broadcasts that almost don’t get on the air. We have respected journalists saying that there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over another. We have a broadcast that is among the most important in America. The most successful in the history of all television. It was doing great, so why are we making these changes?”
Those changes include what Pelley refers to as “Black Thursday,” when 60 Minutes correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, executive producer Tanya Simon, executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, and senior producer were all given their walking papers.
At a staff meeting — shortly before his own firing — Pelley said Weiss was “murdering” 60 Minutes. In an Instagram post last week, Pelley said CBS News’ new management told him to “inject falsehoods and bias” into his reporting. And in his New York Times interview, Pelley said Weiss needs to be replaced.
“Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing,” he explained. “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. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, ‘Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.’”
Despite the tumult, Pelley thinks his former employer has a chance at survival. “We need adult supervision and at the moment we don’t have it,” he said. “We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”