Scott Pelley’s Sayonara to ‘60 Minutes’

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At a quick glance, Scott Pelley’s claim that he was surprised at being fired by CBS seems a bit naive.

In case anyone missed the fracas at CBS News, Pelley, a 37-year veteran at CBS and the lead correspondent at CBS’s star news show, 60 Minutes, exploded at the show’s newly appointed producer, Nick Bilton, and CBS News’ controversial, recently appointed news director, Bari Weiss. Pelley accused Weiss of trying to kill the show and Bilton of having slender qualifications to replace the show’s producers who had just been fired. Neither Weiss nor Bilton had any previous experience in TV news.

Weiss countered that. Despite the fact that 60 Minutes had increased its audience in the previous season by an astonishing 9 percent, the show was failing to keep up with journalism’s rapidly changing ecosphere. In short, social media — notably X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and other online media — is reshaping how the country relates to news, and 60 Minutes was, with its aging audience demographic, beginning to look like a has-been.

The outrage was less that Pelley was fired, will have to pound the pavement, and won’t be able to feed his family than from a more impersonal, systemic sense of alarm about the future of journalism, with this firing as some sort of pivotal moment. Pelley is 68, three years past retirement age, and has an estimated net worth of more than $18 million. And with his celebrity status, Pelley could likely land another job if he wanted to. 

Beyond that, it wasn’t clear that things between Pelley and the brass could be readily patched up. Pelley made it clear that he thinks both his immediate bosses should definitely be fired. During a period when I worked at NBC News, I had similar feelings about NBC’s European news director, who was known as “Genghis Cohen, the Destroyer from the East,” because he had ruined so many careers. He casually explained that foreign correspondents didn’t need to speak the language where they were posted, since the network was going to tell them what to say anyway. 

I referred to him with a bit of unmentionable language and the kind of passion that Pelley showed at CBS. I remember his response. “We like people who like us,” he said. “People who don’t like us, we get rid of.” I went off to Morocco for a month, came back, and got a job with a different network. That’s the way broadcast journalism usually works.

The standard advice to anyone entering the field used to be: “If you can’t stand the heat, don’t go in the kitchen.” The news business is not for the faint of heart. A former Time magazine executive gave equally sound advice: “Don’t fall in love with the company; it can’t afford to love you back.” 

Over the years, my feelings about journalism evolved. If you haven’t been fired at least once, I thought, it means that you are probably not doing your job. For a long time, Pelley, who worked at 60 Minutes for more than two decades, was an exception in an industry prone to fast turnover.

Looked at from a different angle, however, Pelley’s rage is easy to understand. Part of it is solidarity with the team that made 60 Minutes a top investigative news show.

Although he began his career in 1989, well after the Vietnam War, he spent time as a war correspondent, covering action in the Middle East and Afghanistan. When you do that kind of reporting, each story involves putting your life on the line. The news is no longer something that you take lightly. Pelley notes that his former boss and producer, Bill Owens, had saved his life. 

To Weiss, CBS employees may simply be numbers. To Pelley, each one is a deeply connected human being, and many are heroes. As Pelley sees it, neither Weiss nor Bilton has the background to really understand that. 

To them, news is a business; either it makes money or you do something else. The competition is not to tell truths that might discomfort the rich and famous, but rather to capture eyeballs that can eventually be monetized. As they see it, the public wants to be entertained, so instead of news, you offer them “infotainment”: a goulash of “news you can use,” a few intriguing tidbits about world events that make you happy to be an American, safe at home. 

America is not the only country to take that route. I had a friend in France who worked for one of the major TV channels and did a story about French railway workers rising early in the morning and breaking the ice in their kitchen sink so they could wash. The correspondent’s boss was furious and said, “You showed poverty. We don’t do that. At least not French poverty.”

CBS News used to be different. The network began when William Paley decided, in 1928, to advertise his family’s cigar stores on a struggling network of 16 radio stations headquartered in Philadelphia and calling itself the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. Paley’s cigar sales doubled within a year, and Paley subsequently gathered a group of investors and bought the network. 

As World War II was developing in Europe, Paley dispatched Edward R. Murrow to Europe with orders to find talent willing to go on the air. Murrow hired the best, brightest, and most articulate reporters he could find and then became one himself, fearlessly reporting from rooftops during the London Blitz while Nazi bombers rained havoc down on the city. The men Murrow hired stayed with CBS News, and they turned the network into the gold standard for broadcast reporting.

As Pelley discovered, all good things come to an end. In a 1960 column, New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling pointed out that freedom of the press is only guaranteed if you actually own one. Vietnam and Watergate proved that the press has enormous power. It didn’t take long for corporate America and its wealthiest billionaires to decide that if you want to escape media scrutiny, the best tactic is to buy up the media. 

If you don’t want journalists to do their normal thing — or in the words of American humorist Finley Peter Dunne in 1902, “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable” — then hire journalists who won’t ask troubling questions or look too deeply into what is going on. 

Russia has used that tactic for a long time. Moscow has two major papers, Pravda (Truth) and Novosti (News). The joke in Moscow is that there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Novosti. Both papers developed a reputation for engaging in the political equivalent of what we might call “infotainment.”

The trouble with that approach is that the enormous power that the media enjoys does not come from the individual journalists who do the reporting. It stems, instead, from the truth that the journalists report. 

In a way, journalists are like the child in the story about the emperor’s new clothes. Their job is to shout out that, in fact, the emperor is naked. Once they stop doing that, when they avoid the truth that really matters, the power of the media evaporates.

60 Minutes, under the guidance of Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton, may die a slow, agonizing death, but I am convinced that journalism will continue, even if it is without Scott Pelley. 

The reason I am convinced of that goes back to a quick exchange that I had with a young woman who had been editing a newspaper in Kazakhstan and was in New York on a brief visit to the journalism department at NYU. Kazakhstan made no pretense at freedom of the press. 

“They didn’t like what I was writing,” the young woman said about the officials she had ticked off in Kazakhstan. “So they cut off the head of a dog and nailed it to my door as a message.” 

That sounded pretty intimidating. I asked her why she kept on despite the evident danger. “It’s what I do,” she said. 

Scott Pelley may be gone, but I have no doubt that there are plenty of others out there who are ready to fill the gap.

William Dowell is WhoWhatWhy’s editor for international coverage. He previously worked for NBC and ABC News in Paris before signing on as a staff correspondent for Time magazine based in Cairo. He has reported from five continents — most notably during the Vietnam War, the revolution in Iran, the civil war in Beirut, Operation Desert Storm, and in Afghanistan.