CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil marked the firing of 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley with a montage and glowing praise for the journalist.
Pelley, who had been with CBS since 1989, was fired on Tuesday by newly installed 60 Minutes executive Nick Bilton. The day before, Pelley had confronted Bilton in front of the show’s staff over high-profile firings and his future plans. CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, he also claimed, was “murdering” 60 Minutes.
On Wednesday, Pelley claimed Weiss had lied to staff when she told them that she and other executives had tried to “find a way back” with Pelley.
On that night’s broadcast of the CBS Evening News, chief correspondent Jim Axelrod reported on the circumstances of Pelley’s firing. Afterward, Dokoupil highlighted Pelley’s long history at the network.
“When I started at CBS, Scott Pelley was in this very chair, and still doing a dozen stories a year for 60 Minutes, and amid all of that, still meeting every new correspondent to share his view of the mission here,” Dokoupil began.
“He believed freedom of the press, to quote [James] Madison, was ‘the right that guaranteed all the others.’ And the stakes are always that high in that if you’d made it to CBS News, you were among the best in the world,” Dokoupil continued. “He worked every single day to live up to that standard.”
Dokoupil has anchored the CBS Evening News since January, after Weiss named him to the role. Paramount CEO David Ellison tapped Weiss to lead the newsroom, despite her having no prior broadcast television experience, in an effort to make the network more palatable to conservative audiences.
On Wednesday, Dokoupil rolled clips from Pelley’s array of coverage, from the post-9/11 cleanup and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the war against Ukraine and the famine in Darfur.
“He was in some ways a man from another era, and that’s not a knock,” Dokoupil, 45, said of 68-year-old multiple Emmy-winner. “He didn’t watch the competition, he said, because he knew who he was. A journalist who valued truth at all costs.”
Pelley, he added, “always kept alive the memory of colleagues killed in the field—a reminder that his chosen line of work could be a dangerous one.”
Dokoupil also noted that it was Pelley who removed the “with Scott Pelley” line in the CBS Evening News logo. In its place was: “with all of us.”
“Well, Scott,” Dokoupil said, “from all of us, thank you.”
Dokoupil’s time in the anchor’s chair hasn’t been without rough patches.
In his first week, he had awkward technical difficulties, was criticized for praising Marco Rubio as the “ultimate Florida man,” and gave a meek treatment of the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
In the following weeks and months, overall viewership of the CBS Evening News consistently trailed rival news broadcasts on ABC and NBC.
