formal letter<\/a> to Mr. Pelley, which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Bilton wrote that the correspondent had been \u201cterminated for cause effective immediately.\u201d<\/p>\nMr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening shortly after he was fired, said he had devoted decades of his life to \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d which he said he still cared about deeply.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have been in combat in Afghanistan,\u201d Mr. Pelley said. \u201cI have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.\u201d<\/p>\n
The firing of Mr. Pelley is among the most consequential moves of Ms. Weiss\u2019s rocky tenure at CBS. And it is almost certain to spike tensions that have coursed through the network for months.<\/p>\n
It also raises the stakes of Ms. Weiss\u2019s surprising decision to replace the entire leadership team at \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d CBS News\u2019s most successful franchise, and hire Mr. Bilton, who has no experience in broadcast TV, to oversee the show. The program\u2019s viewership was up 9 percent this past season from a year prior, and the show is routinely among the nation\u2019s highest-rated weekly broadcasts, according to Nielsen.<\/p>\n
Those viewers are accustomed to familiar faces like Mr. Pelley, who has contributed to the program since 2004. The \u201c60 Minutes\u201d staff prides itself on autonomy, and it is not clear how the show\u2019s production team may react to the firing of Mr. Pelley.<\/p>\n
At the staff meeting on Monday, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley repeatedly pressed Mr. Bilton about the network\u2019s decision to fire Tanya Simon, the show\u2019s previous executive producer. He also told Mr. Bilton that he had \u201cslender\u201d qualifications to oversee the show and that he would \u201cnever be welcome\u201d at \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his letter to Mr. Pelley on Tuesday, Mr. Bilton expressed his deep frustration with those remarks.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,\u201d Mr. Bilton wrote. He called it a \u201cperformative display of hostility\u201d that \u201cdemonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Pelley, asked about the letter in the interview on Tuesday evening, said Mr. Bilton\u2019s missive \u201cbetrays a complete misunderstanding of what we work for and what we live for at \u201860 Minutes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Pelley sent a statement to The Times that assailed the new leadership of CBS News, writing that \u201cincompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc\u201d at the network.\u201d He added, \u201cThe collapse of values at the top has become untenable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Pelley also wrote that senior managers at CBS News had pressured him to insert bias into stories for \u201c60 Minutes\u201d this past season, though he did not provide details about specific segments.<\/p>\n
Mr. Bilton must now take charge of a weekly program that has lost four of its on-air correspondents in the past month. Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were fired last week, and Anderson Cooper voluntarily left the show at the end of the season in May.<\/p>\n
Ms. Weiss was appointed last year by CBS\u2019s owner, the tech scion David Ellison, with a mandate to revamp the news division for the digital era. An opinion journalist with little experience in broadcast television, Ms. Weiss was also a longtime critic of the legacy media.<\/p>\n
Her early interactions with the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d staff led to some awkwardness. In a meeting in October, Ms. Weiss bluntly asked the show\u2019s journalists why the country believed they were biased. In December, she pulled a segment about a Salvadoran prison shortly before it aired, saying it needed more reporting. Ms. Alfonsi, the correspondent, accused Ms. Weiss of a \u201cpolitical\u201d move. (The segment later aired in full, with additional comments from the Trump administration.)<\/p>\n
Mr. Pelley\u2019s future had seemed up in the air since his standoff with Mr. Bilton on Monday.<\/p>\n
Leaders at CBS News set a meeting with Mr. Pelley on Tuesday intending to find a path forward after Monday\u2019s fireworks. But the meeting turned contentious and ended with no clear resolution, according to three people with knowledge of the private gathering. In attendance were Mr. Pelley, Ms. Weiss, Mr. Bilton and Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pelley said in the interview that Ms. Weiss would not answer his questions about why the network had decided to fire Ms. Simon, Ms. Alfonsi and Ms. Vega.<\/p>\n
Ms. Weiss\u2019s behavior, he said, \u201cwas cold and callous and beneath the dignity of CBS News.\u201d<\/p>\n
After his meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Pelley said, he returned to the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d offices. Staff members had gathered, awaiting word of his fate, but hours passed with no answer. He eventually urged the staff to return home, then left the building himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, jettisoning one of the network\u2019s best-known journalists in a clash over…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":840955,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[9],"tags":[339242,311673,339240,344368,22474,339241,26871,171,210762,10604,344369,10612,399,67,16852,132,68,27834],"class_list":["post-840954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-60-minutes-tv-program","tag-appointments-and-executive-changes","tag-bari","tag-bilton","tag-cbs-corporation","tag-cbs-evening-news-tv-program","tag-cbs-news","tag-entertainment","tag-news-and-news-media","tag-nick","tag-pelley","tag-scott","tag-television","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-politics-and-government","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-weis"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116684957435851873","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/840955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}