Freshly fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley sounded off on CBS on Tuesday, accusing them of forcing him to report from a politically biased perspective. Pelley was fired after an explosive meeting in which he criticized CBS head Bari Weiss and newly hired executive producer Nick Bilton.
“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. 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,” he wrote in a statement. “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.”
Pelley even claimed that politicians had been allowed to choose who they wanted to be interviewed by, and that “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc.”
This all comes after Pelley and Bilton’s confrontation at a staff meeting on Monday in which Pelley questioned the new hire on firings and told him that Weiss was “murdering” the show.
“You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” Pelley asked Bilton. “Why was Tanya Simon fired? Why was Sharyn fired? Why was Cecilia fired? Why Draggan? Do you know the names of the people that were fired? … We don’t trust you.”
It hasn’t even been a year since Weiss took over CBS, and she’s already fired or alienated some of the longest tenured reporters at one of the most lauded networks in this country’s history.