By Kaitlyn Kiepert
Thursday, June 04, 2026
Scott Pelley’s 37-year career with CBS News ended on Tuesday after the 60 Minutes correspondent
accused Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the newsmagazine.
After a long career at CBS, Pelley’s downfall came as he
resisted changes by Weiss and other new leaders who sought to return an air of
objectivity to the program.
“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage
me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and
contempt,” wrote 60 Minutes’ new executive producer, Nick Bilton, in
Pelley’s letter of termination. “I am here to deliver
first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama.”
Bilton, a British-American journalist with a background
in film but not in television news, was appointed the newsmagazine’s new
executive producer on May 28. Pelley met the new hire with hostility, having
been a supporter of former executive producer Tanya Simon, who was fired that same
day.
Bilton’s appointment was the final straw for Pelley amid
a tense season at CBS as he and many of his fellow veteran reporters resisted
Weiss’s new aims.
“60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior
leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without
cause,” he wrote in a letter after being fired. “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.”
“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject
falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” he said. “I’ve been
told to include assertions that are unverified.”
But despite claims that she aims to shift CBS to the
political right, Weiss is a self-identified “left-leaning centrist” whose
stated goal is to serve the forgotten majority of Americans who are neither
part of “an America-loathing far left” nor a “history-erasing far right” and
have been ill-served.
In attempting to achieve that mission, she set out ten “core
journalistic values” when she took over the news network last year, including
the goal of holding “both American political parties to equal scrutiny” and a
promise to report on the world “as it actually is.”
But Pelley and others at the program had gotten
comfortable injecting their own left-wing biases into 60 Minutes.
Pelley made clear his political positions and his
distaste for President Trump on many occasions.
On March 4, 2025, Pelley interviewed Marc Elias, the
elections and voting rights attorney who defended the Biden administration and
Democratic National Committee in lawsuits brought by President Trump over the
2020 election results. Pelley introduced the program with a statement aimed
directly at the Trump administration: “It was nearly impossible to get anyone
on camera for this story because of the fear now running through our system of
justice,” Pelley said.
“[D]espite being a target,” the 60 Minutes Facebook
page announced, “Mark Elias is still talking.” Many of the network’s left-wing
viewers applauded Elias as a “hero” and celebrated his “very brave 60 minutes,”
while critics were quick to point out the show’s bias toward Democrats.
Pelley’s attacks on Trump were even more direct one month
prior, during a 60 Minutes program on the dismantling of USAID.
Aired on February 16, 2025, the program opened with a
direct reproach of the president. “It’s too soon to tell how serious President
Trump is in defiance of the Constitution,” Pelley said. “Presidents often push
limits — FDR’s New Deal, for example — and voters in this last election wanted
change. But the scope and speed of Trump’s reach for power may be
unprecedented.”
The program also targeted Elon Musk, accusing him of
exorbitant spending and unwarranted job cuts.
Following the 2024 election, Pelley’s November 17, 2024,
program was widely criticized for its overt rebuke of Republicans. “This past
week, Republicans won the House majority and President-elect Trump made
nominations to his Cabinet,” he said. “Some nominees appear to have no
compelling qualifications other than loyalty to Trump.”
By the end of the update, his tone was outright
skeptical. “It’s up to the new Republican majority in the Senate to decide
whether these nominees are equipped to represent the American people,” he said.
“It seems hard to remember when America was united.”
And in March 2025, Pelley delivered an anti-Trump
commencement address at Wake Forest Academy. In it, he compared modern America
to George Orwell’s dystopia in 1984 and encouraged the graduates to
fight against the fear stirred up by modern American leaders.
“‘Diversity’ is now described as ‘illegal.’ ‘Equity’ is
to be shunned,” he said. “‘Inclusion’ is a dirty word. This is an old playbook,
my friends. There is nothing new in this.”
But Pelley failed to use that same critical tone when
reporting on President Biden.
Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel,
Pelley met with then-President Joe Biden during his October 15 60 Minutes program.
“Rarely does a president confront so much peril; the catastrophe in Israel —
the war in Ukraine — and no help from a paralyzed Congress,” Pelley said,
opening the program. Pelley acknowledged Biden’s apparent weariness but
attributed his physical exhaustion and “life-long stutter” to the pressure of
politics.
Pelley had also raised the subject of Biden’s age and
general exhaustion during a 60 Minutes interview with Biden a year
earlier, even going so far as to ask, “How would you say your mental focus is?”
Biden’s reply was indistinct. “I’d say it’s– I think
it’s– I– I haven’t– look, I have trouble even mentioning, even saying to
myself, my own head, the number of years. I no more think of myself as being as
old as I am than fly,” he said.
Pelley turned away from the opportunity to press Biden on
his slowly-delivered rambling, choosing to instead move on to discuss Biden’s
“string of legislative successes” and his approval ratings.
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