60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley confronted new executive producer Nick Bilton and another CBS executive Monday morning in what Guardian US media reporter Jeremy Barr described as a "heated meeting," pushing back forcefully on last week's mass firings at the storied newsmagazine.
Pelley didn't mince words about who he held responsible.
"She's murdering 60 Minutes," Pelley said of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, according to Barr. "She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that."
Producers were present and showed support for Pelley during the meeting, Barr said.
The firings Pelley pushed back on included veteran correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, fellow correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich — all ousted last Thursday as Weiss installed Bilton, a tech journalist and TV news outsider, to lead the broadcast.
Pelley's outrage has been building for months. When Weiss pulled Alfonsi's CECOT segment just hours before its scheduled December broadcast — after it had cleared every internal editorial and legal review — Pelley lashed out in a staff meeting. "She needs to take her job a little bit more seriously," he said at the time, according to The New Yorker.
On Wednesday night, just hours before Alfonsi was formally fired, Pelley saluted her from the stage at the News and Documentary Emmy Awards at Lincoln Center.
Critics have accused Weiss of spiking the CECOT story to placate the Trump administration, a charge her allies deny. Alfonsi, who has hired a litigator, called her ouster "a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting."
