Scott Pelley Details Events Leading Up to His ’60 Minutes’ Firing, Calls for Removal of Bari Weiss at CBS News Amid…

In his first interview since being fired from 60 Minutes last week, Scott Pelley opened up about the events leading up to his dismissal and called for the removal of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.

Speaking to The New York Times, Pelley opened up about last week’s staff turmoil, which saw the ousting of executive producer Tanya Simon and two of her top deputies, with tech journalist Nick Bilton brought in to succeed her. Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega also were ousted. Pelley called these events “the Black Thursday massacre,” noting that the most recent season under Simon, who has been at CBS News for 25 years, had seen a ratings boost and also grown its online presence by 190 percent. He added that the firings they came the day after he and Simon attended the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, where they won two trophies.

“Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired,” said Pelley, himself a 37-year veteran of the network. “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.”

Pelley said his reaction was one of “shock, dismay, impossible to believe, searching desperately for an explanation, knowing that an explanation would be forthcoming and then not seeing that.” He shared that 60 Minutes is like a family. “We travel together. We dine together. We go into literal combat together,” he said. “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.”

Following those events, CBS brass did try to reach Pelley, but he said he was “too emotionally wrought up” and wanted to wait a beat to talk. He found out that there was going to a staff meeting the following Monday and canceled a planned hiking trip to the Canadian Rockies with his wife. “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,” Pelley said.

This meeting the first time he met Hilton. Pelley told The Times that he and the others in attendance expected Weiss to show up and explain what happened, but she didn’t. “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,” he said. “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.”

He added that Bilton had already written an “insulting” email to the staff sharing his thoughts on the newsmagazine, opining that it was “strange” that 60 Minutes only aired at 7 p.m. Sundays, “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.”

At that staff meeting, Pelley accused Weiss of trying to kill the show and said that Bilton had “slender qualifications” for arguably the most prestigious job in TV news. Asked by The Times why he felt he needed to be the person to speak up, he said he looked around the room and realized he was the most senior person in attendance, given that the other senior staffers had been let go. “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,” he said, tearing 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.”

Following that meeting, he was summoned to another meeting with CBS News president Tom Cibrowski. He had no idea he was going to be fired. When he walked into the room, he said the energy was “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,” Pelley said. “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.”

Pelley figured that he meeting would continue about the future of 60 Minutes, but it ended within minutes. “Cibrowski tells me, you’ll have our answer in a few minutes,” Pelley said. He returned to his office and waited for four hours before he decided to leave. Not long after, he received an email saying he’d been fired.

Asked if Weiss “needs to be removed,” Pelley replied: “Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, ‘There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.’ I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, ‘Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.'”

Pelley said he hopes that there will be some sort of realization on behalf of Paramount leadership that “this isn’t working.”

“We have broadcasts that almost don’t get on the air. We have respected journalists saying that there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over another. We have a broadcast that is among the most important in America. The most successful in the history of all television. It was doing great, so why are we making these changes?” he said. “We need adult supervision and at the moment we don’t have it. We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”

More to come.