|
 |
Friends,
Scott Pelley, the famed CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent who was fired last week by Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, gave an interview to the New York Times about what occurred. I reproduce it below because it’s an important indictment of Bari Weiss, of Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News, and of David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance, the parent corporation of CBS. It shows very clearly that, in effect, Trump fired Pelley because Trump doesn’t want Americans to get the truth about what he’s doing — just as Trump fired Stephen Colbert from the same network because Colbert was telling Americans the truth about Trump, through satire. The question I want to leave you with (and will take up in a later post) is: what are we going to do about this?
Here are Pelley’s words:
“No one saw the Black Thursday massacre coming. This is our entire senior staff. Tanya Simon, our boss, she’s the first woman ever to be executive producer of “60 Minutes.” And she concluded this season with a growth in our audience of nine percent, which is unheard-of in broadcast television, and a growth of our online presence of 190 percent. Last season, we had 2.5 billion views. That’s a third of humanity! So we’re riding high.
The night before, Tanya and I were at the Emmy Awards, and we won two Emmys. Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired. At the same moment, we are informed of our new executive producer. His name is Nick Bilton. I’m sure he must be a wonderful man, but no one had ever heard of him. He has zero experience in television news and no experience in management. So imagine how we feel when someone like that comes into a shop like “60 Minutes.”
Explain to me exactly how you felt. Shock, dismay, impossible to believe, searching desperately for an explanation, knowing that an explanation would be forthcoming and then not seeing that. No executive at CBS News, our editor in chief, Bari Weiss, coming over to explain, to talk with us, to sit with us. That’s a family at “60 Minutes.” My colleagues and I have worked together 10, 20, 30 years. We travel together. We dine together. We go into literal combat together. My former boss and former producer Bill Owens saved my life in a firefight in Iraq. So, these bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.
CBS leadership says that they tried to get in touch with you to talk about all of those changes before Bilton’s first day and you didn’t speak to them. Why not? I’m almost 69 years old, and if I’ve learned one thing in life, it is not to reflexively react when you feel that way. I thought, I’m going to give it a day. I’m too emotionally wrought up. I am going to say the wrong thing. I am not going to hear what they have to say. This isn’t the moment. So we got through the weekend, and I learned that Nick Bilton was going to speak to the “60 Minutes” staff that next Monday morning. My wife and I had a hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies planned, and I wasn’t going to be able to be at the meeting and she and I talked about it, realized that this was an existential moment for “60 Minutes” and canceled the vacation so I could be there. That was the first time that I had an opportunity to meet Nick Bilton.
At that meeting, you spoke up very forcefully. You asked him why he’d taken the job “knowing that you will never be welcome here.” Why did you decide to have that first interaction with your new boss in public and not behind closed doors? It was behind closed doors. I was with my family in a closed room. None of this was meant to be public. Imagine I’m walking into this room with these people who have devoted their lives to “60 Minutes.” They have not received any kind of explanation. They are waiting for Bari Weiss to walk in the room in the hope that she’s going to explain why this tragedy has occurred and why it was so necessary. I’m waiting to see who comes in and it’s Nick Bilton and one of Bari’s deputies. No Bari. People are a little shocked by this. As we’re standing in there, Nick makes his way to the front of the room and does something absolutely jaw-dropping to me. He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people. The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better. And also, if I can give you a little bit of context.
Please. What happened a couple of days before the meeting was so critical. Nick Bilton wrote an email to the staff, introducing himself. And it was so insulting. He told us that it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved. He said in his email that it was “strange” that “60 Minutes” is only on the air at 7 o’clock Eastern time on Sunday once a week, when we’ve been on the air 24-7 globally, online, for well over a decade. It betrayed the fact that Nick Bilton didn’t know anything about us, didn’t know anything about our culture, and yet was being imposed on us as our new leader.
Why did you feel that you were the person that needed to get the answers at that meeting? First of all, our entire senior staff had been wiped out. They’re not there. I looked around the room. I’m the only correspondent there, which surprised me very much. I learned that my colleagues were out shooting stories, as they should be in the month of June, but I’m the only correspondent. And I looked at my friends and colleagues in the room and realized I was the senior person. So when I saw Nick Bilton’s email and then saw him reading to my brokenhearted people off his phone, I felt that somebody had to stand up not just for the broadcast but for the people. There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant. [Tears up] Newsrooms are sort of like the military or the police or the beautiful people at the FDNY down the street. It is a life-threatening job in many instances. And to have people running CBS News, who don’t know that, have never felt that, and don’t understand it, is a tragedy.
You know, Bari Weiss came into a job with a mandate to evolve and modernize CBS News, to reinvent legacy media. In that meeting, you said Weiss was “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” language that you’ve used here. Can you explain what you mean? It was the wholesale nature of it. Senior staff wiped out after a triumphal year. One of the things Nick Bilton said in that ill-fated email to the staff was that he was excited — I’m paraphrasing here — to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents. And when I saw that, I thought, “They’re going to fire all of us, eventually.” So that’s why I use these admittedly, for a journalist, hyperbolic terms. They capture the scale of what happened.
You then have a meeting with CBS leadership after this very contentious interaction [with Bilton]. Did you go in expecting to be fired? Oh gosh, furthest thing from my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me. The president of CBS News, Tom Cibrowski, sent me a note and said, can you come by and talk to us? And I said, absolutely. I scheduled about an hour on my calendar for the meeting. I didn’t know who was going to be there.
It really didn’t occur to you that you could be fired after so many of your colleagues had been let go, and after you’d had this very contentious interaction with your new boss? Some reporter I turned out to be. I just didn’t connect the dots. I mean, was this meeting [with Bilton] contentious? Yes, but “60 Minutes” is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.
There was a screening once with Mike Wallace, and Mike and the executive producer and founder of “60 Minutes,” Don Hewitt, got into a big argument about a script. Wallace jumps up in the middle of the screening, throws his script up in the air and yells at Don, “Well then you write the effing thing!” One of those pieces of paper comes down and slices an associate producer across the face. He’s bleeding now. He’s got a paper cut on his face. That was about a story. The meeting that I was in was about whether “60 Minutes” was going to even survive.
So, you walk in and what was the energy of the room? Hostile, dismissive. Before I can take my seat, Tom Cibrowski said, this is a firing offense. So I sit down, like, OK, let’s talk about it. Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie. I didn’t come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, well, OK, I take that back. And I said, great.
So I’m thinking that the meeting’s going to carry on. We’re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned. I didn’t have a 60-minute stopwatch in that room. I don’t know how long it lasted really, but I think it was about 10 minutes. Cibrowski tells me, you’ll have our answer in a few minutes. I went over to my office, and much to my surprise, all of my guys on my team were still there. They wanted to know what happened in the meeting. What was that all about? Did they explain why our people were fired? And I sat down in my office, it has a big plate glass window that looks out on the newsroom, and there were a whole bunch of people standing out there. I didn’t think anything of it. I’m waiting to find out what my fate is. I explained to my team, “I think I just got fired, but they haven’t told me that.” And then I look up and all those people are still out there, and then it hits me. This is a vigil. Four hours go by, and I go outside and said, “I’m leaving.” I packed up and left just so those people would go home. And not long after that, the email came through and said that I’d been fired.
I want to take a step back because this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The saga at CBS News began when David Ellison, the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS as part of his purchase of Paramount. There was a lot of turmoil around that sale. The longtime previous owner of Paramount and CBS, Shari Redstone, told my New York Times colleague that she sold the company to Ellison in part because, after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, she wanted to devote herself to causes around Israel. I’m sure there were other reasons as well. Did you ever speak to Ms. Redstone about the sale, and how did you feel about it? I didn’t speak to Shari Redstone about the sale. I felt the sale was very necessary. The company was in financial trouble. It wasn’t clear what our path forward was going to be. Mr. Ellison came in with a lot of money, a young man of vision, and I thought this was going to be very good for all of us.
The very last thing that the previous ownership did was pay a multi-million-dollar bribe to the president to settle this frivolous, ridiculous lawsuit. And very shortly after that, somehow the Trump administration approved the sale. That lawsuit against “60 Minutes” had caused a great deal of concern. Paying the bribe broke our hearts. No lawyer thought that was necessary, but they did it to get the sale through. At that point, my colleagues and I thought, great, that’s behind us. We have bright new leadership with financial resources. We’re in better shape than we were before. That was the theory.
Ellison then hires Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Weiss is a former opinion writer at The New York Times who left to start her own publication after claiming bias in the Times Opinion section. I never worked with her, for the record. The Free Press, which she launched, is generally pro-Israel and bills itself as pushing against what it sees as the mainstream media. What did you make of her appointment? I was not familiar with her name, so I did some research and discovered those things that you just outlined. What concerned me was that she had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News. Those were red flags to me, but I thought, David Ellison thinks she’s the right person for the job. We are absolutely going to welcome her, listen to her, and give her the benefit of the doubt.
When Bari comes in, she has a meeting with senior “60 Minutes” staffers, and in that meeting she asked, “Why does the country think you’re biased?” I wasn’t there, but that is what I’ve been tol