Scott Pelley Breaks His Silence on CBS News Firing, Takes Aim at Network Bosses

So, yeah — Scott Pelley just torched the bridge on his way out of CBS News. The veteran 60 Minutes correspondent says he was fired, and he is not shy about why he thinks it happened or what he says is going wrong inside the show.

'Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.'

What Pelley says 60 Minutes still had going for it

Pelley, 68, laid out a pretty bullish case for the show in a statement dated Tuesday, June 2 (obtained by Deadline). He called 60 Minutes the most successful show of any kind in American TV history, credited its long run at No. 1 to integrity and humanity in the reporting, and said the team had spent the last decade expanding smartly across major online platforms to reach millions more worldwide. He also pointed to a spring surge: at the end of season 58, he says the broadcast posted a 9% jump in viewers on CBS — a number he framed as basically unheard of for a show this old.

His allegations about the new regime

From there, he went straight at CBS News leadership. Pelley says the show 'lost its DNA' last month when the entire senior leadership and two top on-air correspondents were, in his words, fired without cause. He also took aim at what he describes as CBS News' new management team led by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.

• He claims he was instructed to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story, including unverified assertions — and says he either sidestepped or refused those directives.
• He says politicians have recently been allowed to pick which correspondents would interview them for the broadcast, which he calls a hard no for how 60 Minutes is supposed to operate.
• He describes 'incompetence and unprofessionalism' so severe that one of his pieces almost kept the entire show from making air — he says they were 19 minutes from blackout.
• He says leadership and two strong correspondents were pushed out last month, and that people who stood up for the audience and for fairness were 'silenced.'

The ownership wrinkle

Pelley ties all of this to the corporate shakeup. Skydance Media — run by David Ellison, son of billionaire Larry Ellison — bought CBS parent company Paramount last year. In his view, that new ownership is pushing the news division to make political nice. That is a sharp accusation, and to be clear, it is his allegation.

How the firing went down

Earlier Tuesday, Us Weekly confirmed that Pelley's CBS News contract was terminated after a verbal blowup with 60 Minutes' new executive producer, Nick Bilton, during a staff meeting on Monday. In a memo to Pelley, Bilton blasted him for what he called hijacking the EP's first staff meeting to attack his qualifications and motives, saying the performance showed Pelley had no interest in contributing to the show's future or engaging collaboratively. Translation: this was not going to be a workable relationship.

Pelley's exit note

Pelley says most of the CBS News rank and file are still fighting for the show's values, but that a 'collapse of values at the top' left him no choice. After 37 years at CBS, he signed off with a thank-you to the colleagues who backed his reporting — sometimes at real personal risk — and a hope that sanity, competence, and courage return to the building.

One more piece of context

Worth noting: this comes as Anderson Cooper also said goodbye to 60 Minutes after nearly 20 years as a correspondent. And Us Weekly says it has reached out to CBS News for comment on Pelley's claims. No word from the network yet in this particular exchange.