In a stunning development, veteran CBS News 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley has been fired by the network after clashing with the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, in a fiery meeting with the show’s staff Monday.
Bilton informed Pelley of his termination Tuesday evening, writing in a note that his employment was “terminated for cause effective immediately.” Pelley has been at CBS News for decades, and previously served as the anchor of the CBS Evening News.
In the meeting on June 1 with new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton, Pelley said that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is “murdering60 Minutes. She does not love this place; she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”
He also said that Bilton, a veteran technology journalist who previously worked at The New York Times and Vanity Fair, had “slender” qualifications for what is arguably the most important EP job in television news.
“You should hear this from me first. We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Bilton wrote in a note to 60 Minutes staff Tuesday. “I know how much Scott meant to many of you, and I don’t say this lightly. I made repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend, and this afternoon I tried to find common ground. That was not the path Scott chose.”
In the note to Pelley, Bilton wrote: “Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort.”
Weiss hired Bilton in a massive overhaul of the program last month, parting ways with EP Tanya Simon and some of her lieutenants, as well as correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi. Anderson Cooper made the decision to leave the program after this season.
With Pelley’s exit, the show is down to three correspondents: Lesley Stahl, 84; Bill Whitaker, 74; and Jon Wertheim, 55. His firing raises questions about all the other correspondents as well.
“I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity,” Vega said in a statement after her termination. “I am far from the only60 Minutes correspondent who has asked herself, ‘What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?’”
In an interview with THR, Bilton said that he wants to bring 60 Minutes into the 21st century and to a new digital platform, and suggested that new correspondents that he brings in would be specialists in different fields.