Scott Pelley worked at CBS News for 37 years, including as White House correspondent, anchor of the “CBS Evening News” and “60 Minutes” correspondent until he was fired on Tuesday.
His departure came after the editor in chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, dismissed several of his colleagues and hired a new “60 Minutes” executive producer, Nick Bilton.
“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,” Mr. Pelley told Lulu Garcia-Navarro in his first sit-down interview since he was fired.
He spoke about the specific incident he viewed as interference, about his experiences at CBS News over the past weeks and months and about what he hopes will come of this tumultuous time at the network.
Here are five takeaways.
He was insulted by Mr. Bilton’s introductory email.
“He told us that it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore,” Mr. Pelley said.
Mr. Bilton’s email “suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved,” Mr. Pelley said.
Mr. Pelley said that the email also noted “that it was ‘strange’ that ‘60 Minutes’ is only on the air at 7 o’clock Eastern time on Sunday once a week, when we’ve been on the air 24/7 globally, online, for well over a decade.”
“It betrayed the fact that Nick Bilton didn’t know anything about us, didn’t know anything about our culture, and yet was being imposed on us as our new leader,” Mr. Pelley said.
He felt that he was the one who had to speak out.
Of the first staff meeting with Mr. Bilton, Mr. Pelley said that there had been no senior staff members because they “had been wiped out.”
During the meeting, Mr. Pelley accused Ms. Weiss of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program “60 Minutes.”
“I looked at my friends and colleagues in the room, and realized I was the senior person,” he said.
“I felt that somebody had to stand up, not just for the broadcast, but for the people,” he added, tearing up. “There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant.”
“Newsrooms are sort of like the military or the police or the beautiful people at the F.D.N.Y. down the street,” he continued. “It is a life-threatening job in many instances. And to have people running CBS News, who don’t know that, have never felt that and don’t understand it is a tragedy.”
He accused Ms. Weiss of injecting ‘falsehoods and bias’ into a story about protests in Minneapolis.
As he worked on a segment on confrontations in which two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal immigration agents in January in Minneapolis, Mr. Pelley said, he felt it was very important to note that the protesters themselves had been very aggressive.
He said that screenings of the segment for members of the “60 Minutes” staff had been “very well received.”
“We get the piece approved by everyone,” he said. “And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. 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.”
Regarding Mr. Pelley’s claims of interference with his story about the killings of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti, a CBS News representative replied: “In an email, Bari made four points in the course of editorial back-and-forth. They had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair and accurate as possible. As is frequently the case in any newsroom that operates with collaboration, not everything she raised made it into the final piece.”
An entire episode nearly did not make it to air.
The episode that included Mr. Pelley’s Minneapolis story “came within 19 minutes of not making it to air,” he said, because the team working on it had blown its deadline by several hours in trying to respond to Ms. Weiss’s demands.
“The entire hour of ‘60 Minutes’!” he said. “It was the night of the Grammys. ‘60 Minutes’ was the lead-in to the Grammys, and we almost didn’t have a broadcast. I pledged to myself that no matter what Bari Weiss wanted to do in a story, I would never break the deadline again because we put the entire network in jeopardy.”
He believes that Ms. Weiss needs to be removed.
“Television’s not her thing,” he said. “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.’”
But he remained hopeful.
“We can save this,” he said. “It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”
