{"id":721385,"date":"2026-06-07T16:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T16:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/721385\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T16:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T16:53:09","slug":"scott-pelley-presses-paramount-to-remove-cbs-news-chief-bari-weiss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/721385\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Pelley Presses Paramount to Remove CBS News Chief Bari Weiss"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tFormer \u201c60 Minutes<\/a>\u201d correspondent Scott Pelley<\/a> suggested in an interview with The New York Times<\/a> that CBS News<\/a> parent Paramount Skydance remove Bari Weiss<\/a> as the leader of the news division, alleging in an emotional exchange that \u201ctelevision\u2019s not her thing\u201d and that her inexperience with the medium and her belief that mainstream media is biased have undermined the journalism being produced by the venerable outlet.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe need adult supervision, and at the moment we don\u2019t have it. We have people who\u2019ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. They don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing,\u201d Pelley said in an interview with the Times\u2019 Lulu Garcia-Navarro<\/a>. \u201cAnd there\u2019s a subtle political bias that I\u2019ve never seen at \u201960 Minutes\u2019 before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPelley was fired by CBS News last week<\/a> after a dramatic clash with Nick Bilton, who Weiss installed as the executive editor<\/a> of the long-running newsmagazine following the removal of a significant chunk of the show\u2019s senior staff and on-air correspondents. Among those ousted were former executive producer Tanya Simon; executive editor Dragaan Mihailovich; and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the interview, Pelley said Simon\u2019s forced ouster affected him \u201clike your spouse being murdered.\u201d And he said \u201cCBS News is on fire\u201d in the wake of the gutting of the newsmagazine\u2019s senior staff.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the story, CBS News provided a statement that said Weiss had made suggestions on a specific Pelley story that was part of \u201cthe course of editorial back and forth\u201d that \u201chad no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair and accurate as possible.\u201d CBS News also called itself \u201ca newsroom that operates with collaboration.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA CBS News spokesman was not able to offer immediate comment on other parts of Pelley\u2019s interview.<\/p>\n

\n\tWeiss has presided over one of CBS News\u2019 most tumultuous eras. She believes the news division is in a battle not only for its existence, but for new viewers, news aficionados and consumers who do not watch TV and want their information delivered via social and digital platforms. At the same time, CBS News\u2019 shows \u2014 which include \u201cCBS Sunday Morning\u201d and \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d \u2014 are bedrock elements of a significant segment of news diets and generate millions of dollars in advertising and help bolster the distribution of CBS and other Paramount properties on cable systems and streaming venues around the world.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Pelley argued that people at CBS News are well aware of the challenges of modern media. \u201cOf course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous. It\u2019s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They\u2019ve just discovered the internet, and they\u2019re running around telling everybody how important it is,\u201d he said in the interview. \u201cAt CBS News, yeah, join the fight. We started our first \u201960 Minutes\u2019 online show, \u201960 Minutes Overtime,\u2019 in 2010. I shoot TikTok verticals, or I used to shoot TikTok verticals on every assignment. We\u2019re there. We\u2019re everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen asked if Weiss should be removed from her post at CBS News, Pelley replied: \u201cOh, gosh, yes. Look, she\u2019s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television\u2019s not her thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, \u2018There\u2019s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.\u2019 I\u2019m going to decline because I don\u2019t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s not for me, I don\u2019t know how to do that.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPelley said it had been his intention to stay with the program in the wake of its recent overhaul, and that he believed the show\u2019s three remaining correspondents \u2014 Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim \u2014 had agreed to stay last week<\/a> in a bid to keep \u201c60 Minutes\u201d alive. The correspondents \u201chave had conversations before this about staying to maintain the principles of the broadcast. If we leave, we can\u2019t help. There have been other times \u2014 when Anderson left, when others were fired \u2014 that we could have stormed into a meeting and quit, but those very distinguished correspondents and myself did have conversations about this and decided that we were better working on the inside, and that we could influence things for the better. And we did,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it was my intention to stay and do exactly that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd he said his clash with Bilton was part of the decades-old culture at \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d where correspondents and producers defend stories and decisions with great passion. \u201cI mean, was this meeting contentious?\u201d he asked. \u201cYes, but \u201960 Minutes\u2019 is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPelley offered details of Weiss\u2019 suggestions on a piece about the killings in Minneapolis of protesters against a crackdown by ICE, saying that he felt she wanted to put \u201ca thumb on the scale for the president\u2019s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.\u201d And he suggested her \u201cinterference\u201d after top editors had vetted the piece and in the time leading up to the broadcast of the episode in which the story was set to appear could have kept the piece off the air.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think inexperience\u00a0is\u00a0the larger part of the problem,\u201d Pelley said. \u201cThe most difficult thing for the staff is trying to make up for all of these missteps in terms of our production and the technical aspects of television. It\u2019s been enormously stressful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former \u201c60 Minutes\u201d correspondent Scott Pelley suggested in an interview with The New York Times that CBS News…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[10942,64,63,172868,89600,134,346035,427],"class_list":["post-721385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-60-minutes","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bari-weiss","tag-cbs-news","tag-entertainment","tag-scott-pelley","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}