Ousted 60 Minutes legend Scott Pelley isn’t holding back about the blatant bias he says is taking hold at CBS News.
Pelley, who was fired after confronting CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and other executives over what he viewed as the network’s rightward shift, appeared on The New York Times’ The Interview podcast and detailed “the fire” ablaze at his former network.
On Sunday, the 68-year-old veteran correspondent accused Weiss, a former conservative blogger with no previous newsroom management experience, of attempting to interfere with the once-pristine newsmagazine show on behalf of the Trump administration.
“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration,” Pelley said of Weiss. “Constantly looking out for the views of the president.”
Specifically, Pelley cited an incident that took place while he was reporting on the deadly immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, which culminated in the deaths of U.S. citizens and protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents.
“I felt it was very important 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,” Pelley told Times’ journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
But, he alleged, that wasn’t enough for Weiss. Pelley said the Free Press founder wrote to his former boss, executive producer Tanya Simon, outlining a list of demands after viewing his segment.
“Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent?” Pelley alleged.
“Now, I’m paraphrasing….And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer,” he added. “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.”
Good, 37, was killed after an ICE agent fired three shots through the windshield and side window of her SUV. Numerous analyses of video footage shot from multiple angles determined that Good was turning her vehicle away from the officer, Jonathan Ross, when he opened fire. Ross was heard calling her a “f--king b---h” in the moments after she was struck.
Donald Trump, however, falsely claimed that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer”—an assertion he later walked back after learning Good’s father was a Trump supporter.
Pelley ultimately refused to make any editorial changes. Weiss’ comments, he said, came so last-minute that the episode was within “19 minutes” of not making it on air.
“60 Minutes” was the lead-in to the Grammys, and we almost didn’t have a broadcast," Pelley said. “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.”
The following day, after hearing nothing from Weiss, he said it dawned on him that she “didn’t see the broadcast” at all.
A CBS spokesperson said in a statement, ”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,” the statement said.
The ousted correspondent is far from the first 60 Minutes mainstay to accuse Weiss of interfering with reporting.
Most notably, Weiss threw 60 Minutes’ credibility into question after pulling a segment in December detailing the grisly conditions at an El Salvador megaprison where Venezuelan men deported by Donald Trump were being held. At the time, correspondent Sharyon Alfonsi slammed the move as “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
Alfonsi was fired last month alongside fellow veteran correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and other senior staffers. Weiss replaced Simon, a producer at the program for nearly 30 years, with tech columnist Nick Bilton, who has no traditional broadcast journalism experience. He does, however, host a tech podcast that racks up fewer than 1,000 views a week, compared with the roughly nine million viewers 60 Minutes averaged last season.
Pelley was shown the door days later after heatedly confronting Weiss and Bilton about the bloodbath.
“It’s like your spouse being murdered,” he told Garcia-Navarro of Weiss’ sledgehammering of his former workplace.
When asked whether he believes Weiss should be fired, Pelley did not hesitate.
“Oh gosh yes,” he said, emphasizing that her “incompetence” was perhaps the biggest issue of all.
“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.’”
