This is the most respected newsman in America refusing to go quietly.
In his first interview since CBS fired him on June 2, Pelley told The New York Times exactly what he believes is happening to the most storied news program in television history.
He says Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief installed over CBS News, was “putting a thumb on the scale” for the Trump administration during the most recent season of 60 Minutes.
He pointed to a specific example: his own story on the ICE crackdown in Minneapolis, where he says editorial interference came into play.
But Pelley’s deeper charge wasn’t just political bias. It was raw incompetence.
“We need adult supervision, and at the moment we don’t have it,” he said. “We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
On Weiss specifically: “She’s a lovely person… But television’s not her thing. She brings an ideology into CBS News where that is just anathema.”
He compared handing her CBS News to telling someone with no training to fly a passenger jet. “There are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris. I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue.”
Then there was the carnage that started it all.
Pelley called the late-May purge “the Black Thursday massacre,” when 25-year veteran executive producer Tanya Simon and two of her deputies were fired, along with correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. All of this while the show was the most-watched it had been in years.
And the survivors are not playing along. Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim told staff their decision to stay is “not an endorsement of the existing power structure.”
Their warning if the interference continues: “If not, we leave.”
Asked point-blank whether Weiss should be removed, Pelley’s answer was simple. “Oh, gosh, yes.”
A free press dies one newsroom at a time. Pelley just refused to let this one go quietly.
