Paramount Skydance Corporation should remove Bari Weiss as CBS’ editor-in-chief, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley said Sunday in a lengthy interview with The New York Times. Pelley added that “trust is broken” between his colleagues who remain at the network and leadership.
Weiss is a “lovely person,” he told the Times. “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,” Pelley continued. “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, who was fired from the network Tuesday, also defended himself against criticisms from President Trump, who said he represented “stupid, crooked people that don’t care about your country.”
“Stupid? I can take that. Stiff? Yeah, probably. Don’t care about the country? I’ve never worn the uniform. But I’ve been in combat for this country, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kuwait. I’ve been shot at, spent nights in foxholes filling up with water in the desert,” Pelley answered.
“I’m not aware that the president of the United States has ever done any of those things for his country. Please correct me if I’m wrong. You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions that the president used about me might be applicable, not that one. There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. That is why I am a journalist.”
Elsewhere in the interview Pelley refuted comments from Weiss and Nick Bilton, who have each said the program wasn’t doing enough to reach a younger audience.
“Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous. It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open,” Pelley said. “They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is. At CBS News, yeah, join the fight. We started our first ’60 Minutes’ online show, ’60 Minutes Overtime,’ in 2010. I shoot TikTok verticals, or I used to shoot TikTok verticals on every assignment. We’re there. We’re everywhere.”
Tanya Smith’s firing in late May was “like your spouse being murdered,” Pelley also said. “I don’t care about me. It’s not about me. I am not emotional about this because I have lost this job. I’ve done it for a long time. I’ve had the greatest experiences. But the people I leave behind, treated in this way? That breaks my heart, and it’s going to take me a long time to get over it.”
“The Simon family is legendary at CBS News. Her father was a famous Vietnam correspondent and then Bob Simon covered every single war, everywhere in the world throughout his entire career,” he also said.” I was with him in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1990. We would stand on the roof of the hotel and watch the missiles come in. He taught me how to be a war correspondent. And then Tanya Simon comes in. She’s at the broadcast 30 years. There is no respect for that. Get out of the office by five o’clock? What company in the world treats their precious people that way?”
Recent dismissals and departures are largely due to Weiss’ own experience in broadcast journalism, Pelley explained. “I think inexperience is the larger part of the problem. The most difficult thing for the staff is trying to make up for all of these missteps in terms of our production and the technical aspects of television,” he said. “It’s been enormously stressful.”
Weiss previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and the Times prior to founding The Free Press.
