Scott Pelley looks ready to sail into the sunset.
Days after being fired from 60 Minutes following a spectacular blowup with CBS News management, the veteran journalist resurfaced on social media with a brief message for the supporters who have rallied behind him.
“To all of you who have been so kind, you are the wind in my sails,” Pelley wrote on Instagram Saturday alongside a photo of himself steering a boat.
“So deeply grateful.”
The post marked a dramatic change in tone from a week in which Pelley launched blistering attacks on the network’s new leadership.
The veteran correspondent was fired on Tuesday after a dramatic confrontation during a staff meeting with newly installed 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton, who has no experience in broadcast news.
Pelley also accused CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the iconic newsmagazine and claimed she had been brought in to dismantle it.
“She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that,” Pelley told Bilton.
Bilton later accused Pelley of staging an “ambush” and displaying “remarkable incivility and contempt” during the meeting before terminating the longtime correspondent and ending his 37-year career at CBS News.
“I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them,“ Bilton wrote in Pelley’s termination letter.
“It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead.”
In a lengthy farewell statement, the veteran correspondent accused CBS’ new leadership of sacrificing 60 Minutes to appease the Trump administration and abandoning the values that made the program a television institution.
“Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration,” Pelley wrote.
“The waste is heartbreaking.”
Pelly also claimed he had been instructed to inject “falsehoods and bias” into a politically sensitive story and pressured to include unverified assertions on air.
“The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well,” Pelley wrote.
Pelley has shown little sign of backing away from those claims.
In an interview with The New York Times, which is set to be released in full on Sunday, Pelley doubled down on allegations that the network’s new leadership is tilting coverage in favor of the Trump administration.
“We have respected journalists saying that there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over another,” Pelley said in a preview clip.
“And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before.”
He added that the network could still change course but warned that, “right now, CBS News, in my view, is on fire.”
Not everyone has rallied to Pelley’s side.
During Friday’s episode of Real Time, host Bill Maher said he supported Pelley’s firing.
“I’m for it,” Maher said.
“I don’t know if I would have noticed any difference if I hadn’t been reading about it.”
The comedian was equally dismissive of Pelley’s stature at the network.
“I just don’t think being a 60 Minutes correspondent is that hard,” Maher said. “I don’t feel like Scott Pelley was a national treasure.”
