'She Was Brought in to Kill' 60 Minutes: Scott​​ Pelley Unleashes on Bari Weiss at CBS Meeting

Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley took aim at the qualifications and intentions of CBS News' right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, on Monday at an explosive staff meeting that was meant to introduce employees of the 57-year-old news show to its newly appointed executive producer days after several journalists were fired in what Pelley referred to as Black Thursday.Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist who first gained notoriety for campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia University and went on to rail against woke progressives and cancel culture, appointed tech journalist Nick Bilton to lead the program last week after firing two executives and two top correspondents. Bilton opened the meeting by reading some prepared remarks, but Pelley quickly cut in to tell the new producer that he had many questions about the dismissals of reporters Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.I guess you wandered in expecting to read a statement off? Pelley asked Bilton, his voice reportedly shaking in anger at times. What was wrong with Sharyn Alfonsi?Alfonsi and Vega won a prestigious journalism award for a story on President Donald Trump's deal with El Salvador to send immigrants to the country's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the abuse detainees have suffered there, and the fact that many of those deported to the prison have not been convicted of crimes and have been falsely accused of being members of violent gangs. The story was pulled from the air last December after Weiss complained that it hadn't covered the Trump administration's perspective, garnering accusations of censorship, and eventually aired with some editing. Pelley suggested on Monday that such decisions revealed Weiss' intentions for the broadcast as a whole.“She’s murdering ’60 Minutes.’ She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that,” Pelley told Bilton. “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job.The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, he added, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”'CBS Evening News' has had declining viewership, often below 4 million viewers a night, according to NPR, with the broadcast flagging since Weiss installed Tony Dokoupil as anchor. Media critics have warned that Weiss appears to be running the Trump playbook at CBS, as Sophia Tesfaye wrote at Salon last week: Take an institution that still commands public trust, install loyalists with no relevant experience in positions of authority, fire the people who push back, dress the whole operation in the language of reform—fairness, innovation, a new direction—and you dare anyone to prove that what you’re really doing is building a protection racket.Weiss took the helm of CBS after parent company Paramount's merger with Skydance, owned by the son of tech billionaire and Trump backer Larry Ellison.Charles Forelle, the managing editor of CBS News and a close associate of Weiss, repeatedly attempted to steer Monday's meeting away from Pelley's criticism of Bilton and the new direction 60 Minutes appears to be taking, saying at one point that Pelley's line of questioning was not actually productive.It's working for me, replied Pelley. After Pelley said the network's leadership had been cruel in firing veteran journalists from the show, Forelle accused him of being rude.I'm not being rude, he shot back. You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at 5:00. Sending Draggon Mihailovich to HR to get fired, because no one could look him in the eye. Not talking about Sharyn Alfonsi's contract. Not talking about Cecilia Vega's contract. Just calling them up and telling them they were fired. That's rude.This is a conversation, Pelley added. That is rude, and you were part of that.Alfonsi's contract with 60 Minutes was not renewed; Vega was dismissed despite her contract not being up until 2027. The two journalists spoke out about their firings, with Alfonsi saying, Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not.Vega said that in recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories.60 Minutes employees applauded Pelley on Monday after Bilton left the meeting, and observers praised the veteran journalist for defending the show and the work of its staffers. Scott Pelley told the truth today, said Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket. We need independent media the right wing can't buy.