Scott Pelley called out CBS News owner David Ellison following his termination at “60 Minutes,” suggesting the Paramount Skydance CEO was “casting aside” the news program to curry favor with Donald Trump.
Pelley released a lengthy exit note after he was let go from the storied newsmagazine Tuesday evening. The statement came after a clash with Executive Producer Nick Bilton earlier in the week, in which he accused editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” the program.
Yet, Pelley had a few choice words for Ellison upon his ouster from “60 Minutes,” writing, “Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration. The waste is heartbreaking.” (Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is currently seeking final approval from Trump’s Department of Justice over the Warner Bros. Discovery merger.)
He specifically took umbrage with Weiss’ recent firings of Tanya Simon, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, noting, “’60 Minutes’ lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience.”
As he went on, Pelley reiterated accusations he made to The New York Times earlier on Tuesday, that “new management [had] instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” He also alleged that politicians had been given “control over ’60 Minutes’ interviews.”
Representatives for CBS News and Paramount did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment. However, in a memo sent to staff, Bilton defended that he “made repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend, and this afternoon I tried to find common ground,” stating “that was not the path Scott chose.”
Bilton voiced his “unyielding support” to the remaining staffers at “60 Minutes.”
Read Pelley’s full statement below.
“There has never been anything in America like ’60 Minutes.’
The Sunday tradition is the most successful program of any kind in history. For more than a decade, its innovative growth on every major online platform has extended its reach to countless millions around the world. This spring, at the end of our 58th season, ’60 Minutes’ grew rapidly with an unheard-of 9% jump in viewers on CBS.
’60’ has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality and humanity in our stories. When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.
The waste is heartbreaking.
Last month, ’60 Minutes’ lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.
For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over ’60 Minutes’ interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.
At ’60 Minutes,’ we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to ‘keep up the good fight.’ Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of ’60 Minutes’ is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.
I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion—a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.
-Scott Pelley”
