The daughter of 60 Minutes legend Morley Safer says her father would want CBS staff to speak out against the current leadership.
Another tumultuous week under CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, as she attempts to make the network more Trump-friendly, ended with top 60 Minutes talent being fired.
Last week, Weiss tapped Nick Bilton, who, like herself, has no broadcast news experience, to lead 60 Minutes—a move that was met with pushback from the iconic 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.
Pelley voiced his concerns about the direction of 60 Minutes in a Monday meeting, which led to his being fired “for cause” hours later.
Sarah Safer, daughter of the late Morley Safer, wrote in a scathing op-ed published in The Guardian that her father was often combative with executive leadership, but was never punished for it like Pelley was.
“Over the years, I’d ask my dad if his occasional sharp criticism of the CBS brass or its sponsors was wise. His usual response was: ‘What are they going to do? Fire me?’ This week we learned that under CBS’s current regime, the answer would be yes,” she wrote.
Safer joined 60 Minutes in 1970 as a full-time correspondent during its third season and remained with the show until he announced his retirement in May 2016. Throughout his tenure, he reported a record 919 stories.
Sarah Safer recalled organizing some of his things after he died in 2016, in which she said she found “copies of letters that if written today would likely threaten his job.”
“‘You have ruined this company,’ he wrote to Larry Tisch in 1990, a couple of years after Tisch famously slashed the news division’s budget and fired hundreds of staffers in the name of cost-cutting,” she recalled.
“Fifteen years later, he warned the CEO of CBS that the changes being brought to the newsroom ‘suggest[s] some form of designer-news, or happy-talk that would by its very nature drive out the kind of information the country needs to have at one of the most dangerous periods in its history,’” she remembered.
“Like Pelley, he would have called out the bullies who are decimating the broadcast today,” she wrote, as she encouraged current staff to speak out against network leadership.
Since being fired, Pelley has said Weiss pushed him to include “falsehoods and bias” in his reporting. He also said her behavior is “cold and callous and beneath the dignity of CBS News.”
Representatives for CBS News did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Pelley accused CBS News of attempting to “curry favor with the Trump administration”, especially as its owner, Trump-friendly billionaire David Ellison, seeks regulatory approval for an $81 billion acquisition of Warner Bros.
In her piece, Sarah Safer recalled a story in which then-President Lyndon B. Johnson suggested that her father was a traitor and a communist, and called upon then CBS News leader Frank Stanton to fire him. But she noted that in this case, CBS did not bend the knee.
“Stanton called his bluff, but under our current leadership, both in Washington and at CBS, it’s not hard to imagine that if this happened today, my father’s green card would be revoked and his career at CBS would be finished,” she wrote. “That is, if the story even made it on air.”
