Fired Scott Pelley Says '60 Minutes' Under Bari Weiss Wanted 'Falsehoods and Bias' Injected

Fired by the network where he had worked for nearly four decades on Tuesday night, veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley said in a statement that he had been directed by the new management team at CBS News, led by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story and also told to include assertions that are unverified in his reporting.What looks like the collapse of 60 Minutes has played out both behind closed doors at the network in recent months and publicly, with a series of high-profile firings of other longtime journalists and producers at the show. Details of internal meetings have been leaked, revealing serious tension between veteran members of the nation's most-watched television news magazine and Weiss' new management team.“The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable,” Pelley said in his statement, released just hours after Nick Bilton, the show's new executive producer appointed by Weiss last month, announced the firing. “The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well. Bilton said in his statement that Pelley had been “terminated for cause effective immediately, following a contentious staff meeting on Monday in which Pelley accused Weiss, who was not at the meeting, of being brought in to kill the program, not save it.Despite repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend and earlier on Tuesday, Bilton said, his efforts to find common ground with Pelley were not successful. That was not the path Scott chose, he said. Pelley's narrative of events was starkly different.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, Pelley said in a statement sent to several news outlets. 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, he continued, 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.”Pelley concluded: “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.”