Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft slammed MAGA-curious CBS boss Bari Weiss’s firings of prominent staff at the prestigious news documentary program, calling it “a slap in the face to everybody who’s worked there.”
Appearing on PBS NewsHour on Wednesday, Kroft, 80, shared his thoughts on the major staffing changes made to the newsmagazine in the wake of Weiss’s installation as the network’s editor-in-chief, including the high-profile firing of longtime correspondent Scott Pelley earlier this week.
“I think it’s been disastrous for the show, you know, for the audience, which is not insubstantial,” Kroft, who spent 30 seasons as a correspondent on the program before retiring in 2019, told anchor Geoff Bennett. “It’s been going on for a long time.”
The legendary reporter said the shift first began in 2024, when CBS was sued by the Trump administration over journalist Bill Whitaker’s interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris for what they called an “illegal edit.”
CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance—owned by billionaire nepo baby and Trump ally David Ellison—settled the case for $16 million, despite the case having “absolutely no merit,” according to Kroft. “And since then, it’s just been, sort of, one thing after another,” he said.
The Emmy-winning correspondent said that the decision to clean house was personal and in no way for the benefit of the program or the network’s integrity.
“I think that this is journalistic interference. It makes no business sense whatsoever,” Kroft went on. “The show is still doing very well. It’s the highest-rated news program on television, and it has been that way for more than 50 years. The audience was up about 9 percent last year.”
“Why would you mess with that?” he added. “It’s got an audience of about 10 million people—between nine and 10 million people—which is still one of the largest audiences on network television.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to CBS for comment on Kroft’s remarks.
Bennett mentioned that Pelley, also a longtime correspondent for the program, spoke about pressure from CBS leadership to insert political bias into his reporting—a claim corroborated by his fellow fired colleague, Cecilia Vega.
Kroft said that during his tenure at the newsmagazine, that had “never happened.”
“I’ve never had anybody ask to, and make any kind of insertion or addition to a story to change the tone of it, or to change the facts of it,” he explained. “I don’t think it’s ever happened at 60 Minutes.”
Kroft went on to mention how Vega pointed out in her closing statement to staff that her colleagues have felt “intimidated from doing stories” and that leadership had “instilled this feeling of fear into the broadcast.”
“I think that’s absolutely, 100 percent true,” he said, adding that he thinks Pelley’s protest against Weiss and newly hired executive producer Nick Bilton was not just for himself, but for his fired colleagues.
“All these people are incredibly good journalists, and the kind of people you would need if you wanted to continue to put a program like 60 Minutes on the air, and now they are gone,” Kroft concluded. “I think it was a slap in the face to everybody who has worked there over a long period of time.”
After Pelley, 68, was fired on Tuesday following a heated confrontation with Bilton, where he accused Weiss of “murdering” the program, the 22-year 60 Minutes veteran shared his own account of what went down after his bosses accused him of “misconduct.”
“I’m saddened to see the transcript of the CBS News morning editorial meeting,” Pelley said in a statement obtained by The New York Times. “Bari Weiss knows what she said is not true.”
“In the meeting on Tuesday, in which I was effectively fired, there was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back,’ as Weiss said in the editorial meeting,” he said. “At no point did anyone in the Tuesday meeting suggest that there could be steps taken by either side that would lead to a resolution.”
Weiss told staff in a newsroom meeting on Wednesday morning that she was “only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect.”
“We cannot do our work without it,” she said. “That foundation was broken on Monday, and despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately, we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways.”
“We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose,” the former opinion writer added.
