The MAGA faithful are losing it over longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, who unloaded on CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and new boss Nick Bilton on Monday.
In what has been described as an explosive staff meeting, Pelley, 68, attacked Bilton, 49, whom Weiss tapped as executive producer last week after firing his predecessor in a 60 Minutes bloodbath. The longtime journalist said Weiss, who was not in attendance, is “murdering” the legendary news program, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
“She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that,” Pelley told Bilton in front of the other staffers, alluding to Weiss’s appointment by Trump-friendly billionaire David Ellison.
At one point during the heated exchange, Weiss’ deputy Charles Forelle interrupted to tell Pelley he was being “rude,” according to Status.
“This is not actually productive,” Forelle said. “This is not an interview.”
“It’s working for me,” replied Pelley, who has been with 60 Minutes since 2004.
Roughly 15 minutes into the meeting, during which Pelley told Bilton, who has no TV experience, that he has “slender qualifications for this job” and that he “will never be welcome here,” Bilton left the room. Before departing, he told the staffers to “enjoy the bagels.”
While the confrontation reportedly earned Pelley applause from his colleagues, it has sparked outrage in MAGAworld.
“What a pompous p---k,” Curtis Houck, managing editor of the right-wing site NewsBusters, wrote in one of multiple X posts about the confrontation.
“Fire. Him. Now,” Houck wrote in another post. “If this happened in just about any other profession, they’d be hauled out by security ASAP.”
Fired Kennedy Center boss Ric Grenell replied to one of Houck’s posts with an armchair media analysis.
“People like Scott Pelley and so many at the NYT have never understood they got left behind because they could no longer feed their advocacy to the public without being challenged,” he wrote. “The public is demanding reporters who aren’t advocates—and Scott Pelley is furious that his gig is up.”
Alex Pfeiffer, who served as President Donald Trump’s principal deputy communications director from January until September 2025, also seized on reports of Pelley’s exchange with Bilton for a broader rebuke of the press.
“Why do journos think they are exempt from common decency?” the former Fox News producer wrote on X. “I don’t think there is any other industry where workers think they have the right to berate their boss in front of coworkers. If Pelley gets fired for this, all the usual suspects will clutch their peals [sic].”
Meghan McCain also weighed in on the controversy with her own commentary.
“CBS News is officially more dramatic than a housewives reunion,” the former The View host wrote on X. “Well done all the way around everyone.”
Meanwhile, Ian Miller, a writer at Fox News’ OutKick, blasted Pelley as “the embodiment of the entitled left-wing ‘news’ correspondent.
“Someone who’s made a career by happily parroting and promoting his ideology, now furious that someone like Bari Weiss is involved to bring balance and intellectual honesty to his program,” Miller said.
CBS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Weiss, a former anti-woke opinion columnist with no professional TV news experience, has been accused of trying to shift CBS News into a more Trump-friendly direction.
In what Pelley called “Black Thursday” during his confrontation with Bilton, Weiss fired correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, as well as executive producer Tanya Simon, a 30-year veteran of the program. Alfonsi, 53, first clashed with the Weiss over an El Salvador jail report that painted the Trump administration in a negative light.
Others on the show who were pink-slipped on Thursday are its executive editor, Draggan Mihailovich, and its senior producer, Matthew Polvoy.
