Scott Pelley Accuses CBS News Brass Of “Subtle Political Bias”

In his first interview since his firing from 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley said that CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and the network’s leadership are engaged in “subtle political bias” to influence the show, while he said that the brass “don’t know what they’re doing.”

In an interview with The New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Pelley also elaborated on a comment that he made earlier last week, shortly after he got notice that he was being terminated. That was that the management of the network had “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” In the case of one story, “the entire program came within 19 minute of not getting on the air at all.”

In the Times interview, Pelley said that the piece he cited was from February, about the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the ICE protest in Minneapolis.

As the piece was about to air, Pelley said, that the segment had featured shots of protesters being aggressive in confrontations with officers, including Pretti, who was shown kicking out a taillight of a police car. The piece, he said, already had the “entire context” of the situation.

On the Sunday of the broadcast, about four hours after a noon deadline, CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss sent a note to the show’s then-executive producer Tanya Simon, he said.

Pelley told the Times, “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”

Good was behind the wheel of her vehicle and shot and killed by an officer in January, setting off outrage across the country and new scrutiny to the administration’s immigration crackdown. The Trump administration claimed that she was trying to strike the officer with her vehicle, but video showed that her wheels were turned away from him, Pelley noted.

Pelley said, “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.”

“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had,” he said. “We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”

Pelley said that he and the video then went through the video multiple times and “realized that the event was not as the president said and not the way Bari Weiss remembered it.”

He said, “Our deadline was noon. It’s now almost 5 o’clock. That’s dangerous as hell. So I decided that I wouldn’t do those things. I wasn’t going to get in a debate about it. I wasn’t going to call Bari Weiss about it. I was just going to refuse to make those changes.”

He didn’t make the changes, and never got a call about it, he said.

“It occurred to me that maybe Bari Weiss didn’t see the broadcast and didn’t realize that those changes hadn’t been made,” he said. “But that’s how that happened. There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.”

The network characterizes the request for edits as something that should be happening in the newsroom. A CBS News spokesperson responded, “In an email, Bari made four points in the course of editorial back-and-forth. They had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible. As is frequently the case in any newsroom that operates with collaboration, not everything she raised made it into the final piece.” The show and the news division also have done a number of hard-hitting pieces in recent months, including a piece on Trump administration tensions with the Vatican and the Pentagon’s lack of preparation for Iran’s attacks on a Kuwait base, a network source noted.

In the Times interview, Pelley was sharply critical of Weiss and the news division leadership for what he called “incompetence.”

His firing followed a verbal confrontation with Nick Bilton, the show’s new executive producer, at a staff meeting on Monday, in which Pelley said that he had “slender qualifications” for the job and accused Weiss of “murdering” the show. In the Times interview, Pelley said that he made the remarks because Weiss and CBS News leadership did not give any explanation for why they purged former executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega the previous week. The show, he said, had made ratings gains and digital viewers were up.

Pelley 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. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”

Bilton has expressed the need for the show to make a greater push into digital, as the show lacks tailored content for podcasts and on other platforms. He also tried to reassure staff in a memo on Thursday, after Pelley’s exit, writing, “it should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: We will never be instructed by the ownership of the company on these stories.”

The network’s leadership said that in the days before the Monday showdown, they had tried to reach out to Pelley but he never responded.

“I’m almost 69 years old, and if I’ve learned one thing in life, it is not to reflexively react when you feel that way,” Pelley said. “I thought, I’m going to give it a day. I’m too emotionally wrought up. I am going to say the wrong thing.”

When he learned of the Monday meeting, though, he said that he canceled plans for a vacation because he “realized that this was an existential moment” for the show. As it turned out, he said, he was the senior most 60 Minutes staffer in the room and the only correspondent there.

“So when I saw Nick Bilton’s email and then saw him reading to my brokenhearted people off his phone, I felt that somebody had to stand up not just for the broadcast but for the people. There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant,” Pelley said.

Pelley indicated support for the decision by the show’s three remaining full-time correspondents — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim — to stay, saying that before he was fired, they had had conversations about maintaining “the principles of the broadcast.”

He said that when he went into a meeting with CBS News leaders on Tuesday, following the Monday confrontation, being fired was “the furthest thing from my mind.” Pelley said, “So I’m thinking that the meeting’s going to carry on. We’re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, [CBS News president] Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned.”

In his letter of termination to Pelley, Bilton wrote that his “performative display of hostility — enacted in front of the staff instead of a civil, private conversation — demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress.”