By Conor Friedersdorf
Thursday, June 11, 2026
After Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes, the
longtime CBS News correspondent uttered a single sentence that captured both
the greatest fears of the program’s fans and the core grievance of its
detractors. Criticizing his new bosses—especially CBS editor in chief Bari
Weiss—he said, “There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60
Minutes before, or at CBS News before.”
CBS News fans fear political bias at the organization
because they believe that President Trump seeks to neuter it, and that its
parent company stands to profit by appeasing him through its managers.
Critics of CBS News have long argued that its journalists
inhabit a liberal bubble that blinds them to their prejudices––blindness
epitomized by the claim that subtle political bias has never existed at
the network, when, for decades, liberal suppositions have informed its
selection and execution of stories.
Both the fans and critics have a point––and insights from
both are needed if CBS News is to thrive, an outcome every American should
want. 60 Minutes is often better than most of what passes for TV news, despite
notable
misses.
Improving it is easier than creating something half as good. And it
consistently reports on malfeasance in government and beyond in ways that
benefit us all. But even its best reporting will fail to have an impact on
Americans who don’t trust it.
The current turmoil at CBS News began in 2024, when Trump
sued its parent company, Paramount, for $10 billion, alleging that CBS News
edited an interview with Kamala Harris deceptively to help her in the
presidential race by airing different versions of her answer on Face the
Nation and 60 Minutes. The lawsuit was a preposterous attack on
First Amendment press freedoms. Yet Paramount agreed to settle, paying $16
million to cover Trump’s legal fees and contribute the rest to his future
presidential library––a settlement reached as it sought Trump-administration
approval for an $8 billion sale to Skydance. Critics called it a bribe, and
that perception was understandable. (Paramount executives and spokespeople have
emphatically denied the accusation, and both Paramount and the Federal
Communications Commission denied any connection between the settlement and the
merger.)
Now Paramount Skydance wants to buy Warner Brothers in
another multibillion-dollar deal that will require various regulatory
approvals. Trump has said that he’ll involve himself in the matter. Nothing
could be more logical than 60 Minutes staffers suspecting that their new
corporate owners might also go to great lengths to please Trump, or to avoid
upsetting him. I can’t imagine any new overseer installed from above giving 60
Minutes notes on stories related to Trump without eliciting suspicion––a
judgment that holds wherever one stands on Weiss, whom I know and like, or on
the debates
about notes
Weiss has given on 60 Minutes stories. As a rule, we should want
journalists at big corporations to be on guard against political meddling, even
when, as outsiders, we can’t know whether or to what degree their concerns are
warranted.
Given all of that context, why is a large faction of
Americans compelled by the notion that CBS News and even 60 Minutes would
benefit from Weiss or other outsiders adding viewpoint diversity to its shop?
Over the weekend, Pelley gave an hour-long
interview to Lulu Garcia-Navarro at The New York Times, telling his
side of what happened at the show. In a short clip that circulated online,
Pelley commented on a meeting in which Weiss asked senior staff, “Why does the
country think you’re biased?”
Pelley said, “I wasn’t there, but that is what I’ve been
told by my colleagues who were there. And they were shocked.” The reaction was
“Uh-oh,” he continued, because “she didn’t offer any kind of a metric. What’s
your metric? Why do you think so? Do you have a poll? Is there market research?
What are you talking about?” Pelley’s response was widely mocked by
conservatives and independents, who perceived him to be cluelessly dismissing
one of their long-standing concerns. I see why. In an era of distrust
toward the media, Americans “see ‘a great deal’ (46 percent) or ‘a fair
amount’ (37 percent) of political bias in news coverage.” Pew Research Center found
in March 2025 (before Weiss joined) that CBS News is less trusted than ABC and
NBC among both Republicans and Democrats. Ad Fontes Media, which scores the
reliability and skew of media organizations, rates 60
Minutes as skewing left.
None of that proves that 60 Minutes is biased. But
its journalists––like journalists at every news organization––should reflect on
the various reasons why many Americans perceive bias. Asking staff to
share why they think such perceptions exist is a reasonable query from any
editor in chief. If this was seen as shocking, then the staff would benefit
from more ideologically diverse colleagues.
As rival narratives about the turmoil at CBS News harden,
the network is in more need than ever of staffers who grasp why partisans on
both sides of the culture war are compelled by different understandings, and
why many Americans are unsure which narrative gets closer to the truth. Among
liberals, the whole of Pelley’s hour-long interview is being celebrated as a
stirring defense of 60 Minutes. Its appeal is easy to understand: Pelley
is an experienced journalist who has reported with bravery from war zones, not
someone who sat in a studio his whole career. And he is suited for the camera:
His voice, pacing, and manner project gravitas, and he shows emotion at moments
that make everything he says feel credible. But anyone compelled by Pelley’s
narrative of events should try to understand why it failed to compel so many
others.
Because I am a cynical writer who looks extra closely at
the words of anyone who seems to be good on television, Pelley’s account raised
lots of red flags. Asked early in the interview how it felt to be fired from a
program where he had worked for so long, Pelley said he could imagine no better
way to describe it than “like your spouse was murdered.” He said he felt sorry
for “these people that I left behind” at CBS News who are “still trapped
there.” He called the firing of several senior staffers at the show the “Black
Thursday Massacre.” He said, “When somebody wipes out, murders, a large number
of your family members, people are hurt, and shocked, in disbelief. And just
desperate for some explanation.” This is language chosen for emotional impact,
not precision––it felt like he sought to manipulate my feelings, not inform me.
Pelley told The New York Times, “I have been in
combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war
zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family
because of my devotion to the broadcast.” In fact, he was covering soldiers who
were in combat, a distinction worth drawing, both for accuracy and because
muddying that distinction is needlessly offensive to many Americans, who
predictably erupted in outrage. What’s more, neither fighting as a soldier nor
covering it as a journalist renders someone correct in unrelated disputes.
Even worse, parts of Pelley’s narrative were
inconsistent. Pelley said that Nick Bilton, the journalist and filmmaker
recently hired by Weiss to lead the 60 Minutes newsroom, introduced
himself to staff in an email, writing that “he was excited to tell the staff
about the new crop of correspondents.” Pelley recounted, “When I saw that I
thought, Okay, they’re gonna fire all of us, eventually. That’s the plan. He
put it in writing for all of us to see.” Later, when the two met in person
for the first time at a staff meeting, Pelley told Bilton that he would never
be welcome at the show and that Weiss is “murdering 60 Minutes,” adding,
“She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it.” Asked why he
felt compelled to speak up, Pelley said that he realized he was the senior
person in the room. “Only I could do it,” he said. “None of them could be asked
to take that risk.”
This suggests he felt speaking up was a risk. But when
asked if he walked into a subsequent meeting with CBS leadership expecting to
be fired, Pelley explained, “Furthest thing from my mind. It hadn’t occurred to
me,” and that when he walked in and saw Weiss, he thought, “This is terrific of
her. She’s come to this meeting, and now I’m going to be able to ask her these
questions. She’s going to be able to explain what happened.” He joked, “Some
reporter I turned out to be. I just didn’t connect the dots. Was this meeting
contentious? Yes. But 60 Minutes is known for two things: a ticking
stopwatch and hard questions.”
“You wanted to remain at 60 Minutes?”
Garcia-Navarro asked.
“Absolutely,” Pelley replied. “It didn’t occur to me that
this could happen.”
Watching the interview, Pelley seems convincing at each
given moment. But try to reconcile them all. He experienced the firing of his
colleagues like lots of family members being murdered … but “absolutely” wanted
to go on working at 60 Minutes, for their “murderers”? He believed that
Weiss was hired in order to murder 60 Minutes … yet when seeing Weiss
after the “massacre” she carried out, he thought, This is terrific of her.
She’s come to this meeting, and assumed that their discussion would go
well?
Pelley saw some colleagues fired en masse, read an email
he perceived as a plan in writing to fire them all, and attacked Weiss and
Bilton in a staff meeting because he felt that it would be unfair for junior
colleagues to take that risk … but it never occurred to him he might be fired?
The culture at 60 Minutes is supposedly such that likening your boss to
a murderer and asserting she has a secret agenda to destroy the show is a
standard form of debate at a place where hard questions have always been
possible … but that same boss asking a question about perceptions of bias was
“shocking” to everyone?
Perhaps everything that Pelley said felt true to him in
an emotional moment when he was reeling from being fired, not broadcasting as a
correspondent. But I find it striking that so many journalistic outlets covered
the interview without noticing or mentioning its tensions and contradictions
(even though Garcia-Navarro expressed skepticism in follow-up questions).
Neglecting to scrutinize narratives that flatter our preconceptions is one of
the behaviors that cost journalists public trust.
Among Americans, clear majorities disapprove of the job
that Trump is doing and the job that the news media is doing. It shouldn’t be
hard, within any large news organization, to raise the subject of bias (there
are many kinds) or to suggest edits that guard against left-leaning bias,
without being seen as a traitor to journalism who must be allying with Trump to
destroy it.
But Trump’s efforts to exert leverage over news
organizations through their corporate parents makes it harder than it would
otherwise be to distinguish untoward meddling from valuable feedback. And
corporate takeovers or management shake-ups always make journalists
anxious, because, as at The
Washington Post, they can easily end in mass layoffs and audience
flight.
Then again, when your news division is trailing its
competitors, in an era when there’s more competition for attention every year
and the average age of your viewers is 58 years old, stasis is perilous, too.
To survive and fulfill its mission, CBS News must achieve two goals that are
not mutually exclusive, but that may prove out of reach: to resist political
interference from the Trump administration and to convince more
Americans that it is worth trusting—or at least watching and considering.
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