{"id":18219,"date":"2026-06-07T06:24:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T13:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=18219"},"modified":"2026-06-07T06:24:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T13:24:12","slug":"the-interview-scott-pelley-on-the-bari-weiss-era-and-his-last-days-at-60-minutes-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=18219","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Interview: Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at \u201860 Minutes\u2019&#8221;, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/planetearthfdn.org\/news\">Back to News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/lulu-garcia-navarro\">Lulu Garcia-Navarro<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>June 7, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/07\/magazine\/07mag-interview-pelley-1\/07mag-interview-pelley-1-articleLarge-v4.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Credit&#8230;Photo illustration by The New York Times<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s hard to overstate the impact of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d on journalism. It\u2019s the most-watched television-news program in America. Since its debut on CBS in 1968, it\u2019s been the home of some of the most-storied broadcast journalists, from Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley to Lesley Stahl, Anderson Cooper and, until this past week, Scott Pelley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pelley, who was at the network for 37 years, including as White House correspondent, anchor of the \u201cCBS Evening News\u201d and \u201c60 Minutes\u201d correspondent, was fired after an explosive series of events and much turmoil over the past few years at CBS. These events include a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/07\/02\/business\/media\/paramount-trump-60-minutes-lawsuit.html\">controversial financial settlement with President Trump<\/a>&nbsp;over a \u201c60 Minutes\u201d segment; the sale of the network to David Ellison; and the appointment of Bari Weiss, a former New York Times Opinion staffer and founder of The Free Press with no television-news experience, to lead CBS News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pelley\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/06\/02\/business\/media\/scott-pelley-cbs-bari-weiss.html\">firing<\/a>\u00a0came after Weiss dismissed several of his colleagues and hired a new \u201c60 Minutes\u201d boss, Nick Bilton, whom Pelley then\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/06\/01\/business\/media\/cbs-60-minutes-scott-pelley-nick-bilton.html\">clashed with<\/a>\u00a0in a staff meeting. Pelley, along with a number of other \u201c60 Minutes\u201d correspondents who were fired, have now accused Weiss of editorial interference and bias, charges that CBS News and Weiss deny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In his first sit-down interview since he was fired, Pelley told me about the specific incident he viewed as interference, about his experiences at CBS News over the past weeks and months, and about what he hopes will come of this very tumultuous time at the network where he spent most of his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A few days before your firing, several high-profile \u201c60 Minutes\u201d correspondents and leaders&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/05\/28\/business\/media\/nick-bilton-60-minutes-bari-weiss.html\">were fired<\/a><\/strong><strong>. Leading up to that, there\u2019d been a lot of reporting about changes that were coming to the show. Was that the sort of change you were expecting?&nbsp;<\/strong>No one saw the Black Thursday massacre coming. This is our entire senior staff. Tanya Simon, our boss, she\u2019s the first woman ever to be executive producer of \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d And she concluded this season with a growth in our audience of nine percent, which is unheard-of in broadcast television, and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.paramountpressexpress.com\/cbs-news-and-stations\/shows\/60-minutes\/releases\/?view=112909-60-minutes-makes-television-history-by-marking-52-straight-seasons-as-americas-1-news-program\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a growth of our online presence<\/a>&nbsp;of 190 percent. Last season, we had 2.5 billion views. That\u2019s a third of humanity! So we\u2019re riding high.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The night before, Tanya and I were at the Emmy Awards, and we won two Emmys. Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired. At the same moment, we are informed of our new executive producer. His name is Nick Bilton. I\u2019m sure he must be a wonderful man, but no one had ever heard of him. He has zero experience in television news and no experience in management. So imagine how we feel when someone like that comes into a shop like \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Explain to me exactly how you felt.<\/strong>\u00a0Shock, dismay, impossible to believe, searching desperately for an explanation, knowing that an explanation would be forthcoming and then not seeing that. No executive at CBS News, our editor in chief, Bari Weiss, coming over to explain, to talk with us, to sit with us. That\u2019s a family at \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d My colleagues and I have worked together 10, 20, 30 years. We travel together. We dine together. We go into literal combat together. My former boss and former producer Bill Owens saved my life\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/variety.com\/2020\/tv\/news\/60-minutes-bill-owens-cbs-news-qibi-coronavirus-1203539110\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">in a firefight in Iraq<\/a>. So, these bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/07\/magazine\/07mag-interview-pelley-02\/07mag-interview-pelley-02-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Scott Pelley, right, as CBS News\u2019 chief White House correspondent, preparing to give a live report during a news conference in 1998.Credit&#8230;David Hume Kennerly\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CBS leadership says that they tried to get in touch with you to talk about all of those changes before Bilton\u2019s first day and you didn\u2019t speak to them. Why not?&nbsp;<\/strong>I\u2019m almost 69 years old, and if I\u2019ve learned one thing in life, it is not to reflexively react when you feel that way. I thought, I\u2019m going to give it a day. I\u2019m too emotionally wrought up. I am going to say the wrong thing. I am not going to hear what they have to say. This isn\u2019t the moment. So we got through the weekend, and I learned that Nick Bilton was going to speak to the \u201c60 Minutes\u201d staff that next Monday morning. My wife and I had a hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies planned, and I wasn\u2019t going to be able to be at the meeting and she and I talked about it, realized that this was an existential moment for \u201c60 Minutes\u201d and canceled the vacation so I could be there. That was the first time that I had an opportunity to meet Nick Bilton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>At that meeting, you spoke up very forcefully. You asked him why he\u2019d taken the job \u201cknowing that you will never be welcome here.\u201d Why did you decide to have that first interaction with your new boss in public and not behind closed doors?&nbsp;<\/strong>It&nbsp;<em>was<\/em>&nbsp;behind closed doors. I was with my family in a closed room. None of this was meant to be public. Imagine I\u2019m walking into this room with these people who have devoted their lives to \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d They have not received any kind of explanation. They are waiting for Bari Weiss to walk in the room in the hope that she\u2019s going to explain why this tragedy has occurred and why it was so necessary. I\u2019m waiting to see who comes in and it\u2019s Nick Bilton and one of Bari\u2019s deputies. No Bari. People are a little shocked by this. As we\u2019re standing in there, Nick makes his way to the front of the room and does something absolutely jaw-dropping to me. He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people. The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better. And also, if I can give you a little bit of context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Please.\u00a0<\/strong>What happened a couple of days before the meeting was so critical. Nick Bilton\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/nickbilton\/status\/2060028458793615646?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">wrote an email to the staff<\/a>, introducing himself. And it was so insulting. He told us that it wasn\u2019t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn\u2019t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air, and that nothing had improved. He said in his email that it was \u201cstrange\u201d that \u201c60 Minutes\u201d is only on the air at 7 o\u2019clock Eastern time on Sunday once a week, when we\u2019ve been on the air 24-7 globally, online, for well over a decade. It betrayed the fact that Nick Bilton didn\u2019t know anything about us, didn\u2019t know anything about our culture, and yet was being imposed on us as our new leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Why did you feel that\u00a0<em>you<\/em>\u00a0were the person that needed to get the answers at that meeting?\u00a0<\/strong>First of all, our entire senior staff had been wiped out. They\u2019re not there. I looked around the room. I\u2019m the only correspondent there, which surprised me very much. I learned that my colleagues were out shooting stories, as they should be in the month of June, but I\u2019m the only correspondent. And I looked at my friends and colleagues in the room and realized I was the senior person. So when I saw Nick Bilton\u2019s 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\u00a0<em>pregnant<\/em>. [Tears up] Newsrooms are sort of like the military or the police or the beautiful people at the FDNY down the street. It is a life-threatening job in many instances. And to have people running CBS News, who don\u2019t know that, have never felt that, and don\u2019t understand it, is a tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You know, Bari Weiss came into a job with a mandate to evolve and modernize CBS News, to reinvent legacy media. In that meeting, you said Weiss was \u201cmurdering \u201860 Minutes,\u2019\u201d language that you\u2019ve used here. Can you explain what you mean?&nbsp;<\/strong>It was the wholesale nature of it. Senior staff wiped out after a triumphal year. One of the things Nick Bilton said in that ill-fated email to the staff was that he was excited \u2014 I\u2019m paraphrasing here \u2014 to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents. And when I saw that, I thought, \u201cThey\u2019re going to fire all of us, eventually.\u201d So that\u2019s why I use these admittedly, for a journalist, hyperbolic terms. They capture the scale of what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You then have a meeting with CBS leadership after this very contentious interaction [with Bilton]. Did you go in expecting to be fired?<\/strong>&nbsp;Oh gosh, furthest thing from my mind. It hadn\u2019t occurred to me. The president of CBS News, Tom Cibrowski, sent me a note and said, can you come by and talk to us? And I said, absolutely. I scheduled about an hour on my calendar for the meeting. I didn\u2019t know who was going to be there.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/07\/magazine\/07mag-interview-pelley\/07mag-interview-pelley-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Pelley as the anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News in 2015.Credit&#8230;Carolyn Cole\/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>It really didn\u2019t occur to you that you could be fired after so many of your colleagues had been let go, and after you\u2019d had this very contentious interaction with your new boss?&nbsp;<\/strong>Some reporter I turned out to be. I just didn\u2019t connect the dots. I mean, was this meeting [with Bilton] contentious? Yes, but \u201c60 Minutes\u201d is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There was a screening once with Mike Wallace, and Mike and the executive producer and founder of \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d Don Hewitt, got into a big argument about a script. Wallace jumps up in the middle of the screening, throws his script up in the air and yells at Don, \u201cWell then you write the effing thing!\u201d One of those pieces of paper comes down and slices an associate producer across the face. He\u2019s bleeding now. He\u2019s got a paper cut on his face. That was about a\u00a0<em>story<\/em>. The meeting that I was in was about whether \u201c60 Minutes\u201d was going to even survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>So, you walk in and what was the energy of the room?&nbsp;<\/strong>Hostile, dismissive. Before I can take my seat, Tom Cibrowski said, this is a firing offense. So I sit down, like, OK, let\u2019s talk about it. Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie. I didn\u2019t come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, well, OK, I take that back. And I said, great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So I\u2019m thinking that the meeting\u2019s going to carry on. We\u2019re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned. I didn\u2019t have a 60-minute stopwatch in that room. I don\u2019t know how long it lasted really, but I think it was about 10 minutes. Cibrowski tells me, you\u2019ll have our answer in a few minutes. I went over to my office, and much to my surprise, all of my guys on my team were still there. They wanted to know what happened in the meeting. What was that all about? Did they explain why our people were fired? And I sat down in my office, it has a big plate glass window that looks out on the newsroom, and there were a whole bunch of people standing out there. I didn\u2019t think anything of it. I\u2019m waiting to find out what my fate is. I explained to my team, \u201cI think I just got fired, but they haven\u2019t told me that.\u201d And then I look up and all those people are still out there, and then it hits me. This is a vigil. Four hours go by, and I go outside and said, \u201cI\u2019m leaving.\u201d I packed up and left just so those people would go home. And not long after that,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2026\/06\/02\/business\/media\/02biz-bilton-letter-doc.html\">the email came through<\/a>&nbsp;and said that I\u2019d been fired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I want to take a step back because this didn\u2019t happen in a vacuum. The saga at CBS News began when David Ellison, the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS as part of his purchase of Paramount. There was a lot of turmoil around that sale. The longtime previous owner of Paramount and CBS, Shari Redstone, told my New York Times colleague that she sold the company to Ellison in part because, after Hamas\u2019s attack on Israel on October 7, she wanted to devote herself to causes around Israel. I\u2019m sure there were other reasons as well. Did you ever speak to Ms. Redstone about the sale, and how did you feel about it?&nbsp;<\/strong>I didn\u2019t speak to Shari Redstone about the sale. I felt the sale was very necessary. The company was in financial trouble. It wasn\u2019t clear what our path forward was going to be. Mr. Ellison came in with a lot of money, a young man of vision, and I thought this was going to be very good for all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The very last thing that the previous ownership did was pay a multi-million-dollar bribe to the president to settle this frivolous, ridiculous lawsuit. And very shortly after that, somehow the Trump administration approved the sale. That lawsuit against \u201c60 Minutes\u201d had caused a great deal of concern. Paying the bribe broke our hearts. No lawyer thought that was necessary, but they did it to get the sale through. [At the time, Paramount denied any link between the settlement payment and the deal being approved.] At that point, my colleagues and I thought, great, that\u2019s behind us. We have bright new leadership with financial resources. We\u2019re in better shape than we were before. That was the theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ellison then hires Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Weiss is a former opinion writer at The New York Times who left to start her own publication after claiming bias in the Times Opinion section. I never worked with her, for the record. The Free Press, which she launched, is generally pro-Israel and bills itself as pushing against what it sees as the mainstream media. What did you make of her appointment?\u00a0<\/strong>I was not familiar with her name, so I did some research and discovered those things that you just outlined. What concerned me was that she had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News. Those were red flags to me, but I thought, David Ellison thinks she\u2019s the right person for the job. We are absolutely going to welcome her, listen to her, and give her the benefit of the doubt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>When Bari comes in, she has a meeting with senior \u201c60 Minutes\u201d staffers, and in that meeting\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/10\/19\/business\/media\/bari-weiss-cbs-60-minutes.html\">she asked<\/a>, \u201cWhy does the country think you\u2019re biased?\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0I wasn\u2019t there, but that is what I\u2019ve been told by my colleagues, and they were shocked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What was the feeling about that opening salvo? \u201c<\/strong>Uh-oh.\u201d She didn\u2019t offer any kind of a metric. Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about? We felt that she was making statements that she couldn\u2019t back up and was coming into the news division with hardened preconceived notions that didn\u2019t seem to be thought through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/07\/magazine\/07mag-interview-pelley-04\/07mag-interview-pelley-04-articleLarge.png?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Pelley during his \u201c60 Minutes\u201d segment on the Minneapolis protests in February.Credit&#8230;Screenshot from YouTube<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>You\u2019ve now accused Weiss of injecting \u201c<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/DZHlWAoG3_3\/?img_index=5\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">falsehoods and bias<\/a><\/strong><strong>\u201d into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. What did she specifically ask for? What story?<\/strong>&nbsp;That\u2019s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We\u2019ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he\u2019s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened \u2014 the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we\u2019d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, the story goes through screenings. It\u2019s very well received. There are notes as always and we do rewrites as always. But this is on a very tight deadline. It\u2019s Sunday; we\u2019re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I\u2019m paraphrasing. I don\u2019t have the quote, but that\u2019s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good\u2019s car. You need to describe her as driving\u00a0<em>toward<\/em>\u00a0the officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good\u2019s 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\u2019t repeat in polite company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn\u2019t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn\u2019t standing in front of the car and she wasn\u2019t driving toward him, but that\u2019s what the president said about that, and that\u2019s the way she wanted it described.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Did you do as she asked?<\/strong>&nbsp;I asked my producers, \u201cDid we leave anything out that\u2019s important? Did we make a mistake here? I don\u2019t think so, but go back and look.\u201d And then I sat down with a video editor, and I went over the video of the Renee Good killing over and over again, and realized that the event was not as the president said and not the way Bari Weiss remembered it. And it\u2019s late. Our deadline was noon. It\u2019s now almost 5 o\u2019clock. That\u2019s dangerous as hell. So I decided that I wouldn\u2019t do those things. I wasn\u2019t going to get in a debate about it. I wasn\u2019t going to call Bari Weiss about it. I was just going to refuse to make those changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Did you change any language in the broadcast? Anything?<\/strong>&nbsp;Not that I recall based on her notes, but as you probably are aware, when you\u2019re doing a story, especially on deadline, a lot of things happen, there\u2019s a lot of input, and you\u2019re just scrambling to save everybody\u2019s skin because you\u2019re going to have a crash, which is what happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Next day I didn\u2019t hear anything. Nobody called, nobody said anything. It occurred to me that maybe Bari Weiss didn\u2019t see the broadcast and didn\u2019t realize that those changes hadn\u2019t been made. But that\u2019s how that happened. There was a thumb on the scale for the president\u2019s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News. [When asked about this incident, a CBS News spokesperson wrote, \u201cIn 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.\u201d]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Could she not have been trying to be fair to the administration at a moment of very high tension?<\/strong>&nbsp;She could have been trying to be fair to the administration, except I felt that the story was abundantly fair to administration and to the ICE officers and to border patrol officers who were caught in that moment.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Is it possible to see this as the system working? She had notes, you felt they didn\u2019t make sense to take, the piece ran, and there was no retaliation.<\/strong>&nbsp;Well, it was the interference that\u2019s a problem, especially in a story that\u2019s been approved by the top editors. And the bigger problem, Lulu, frankly, is not any kind of political influence. The problem was the incompetence. You don\u2019t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air. The entire hour of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d! It was the night of the Grammys. \u201c60 Minutes\u201d was the lead-in to the Grammys, and we almost didn\u2019t have a broadcast. I pledged to myself that no matter what Bari Weiss wanted to do in a story, I would never break the deadline again because we put the entire network in jeopardy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Why did you think she was asking for these things?&nbsp;<\/strong>I need to be a little bit careful here because I don\u2019t want to be hyperbolic. My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We\u2019re reporting those views. There\u2019s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough. [A CBS News spokesperson disputes this characterization, writing, \u201cThere is no credible argument to suggest Ms. Weiss was \u2018putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration\u2019 in any instance over the past seven months.\u201d]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Cecilia Vega, who was recently fired,&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/DY5kqjqu8JR\/?hl=en\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">also alleged interference<\/a><\/strong><strong>&nbsp;after she was let go. Sharyn Alfonsi&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/05\/27\/business\/media\/cbs-sharyn-alfonsi-bari-weiss.html\">as well<\/a><\/strong><strong>, and you are now doing the same. CBS has denied any bias or interference, saying in a recent statement that changes and disputes were \u201cthe normal back and forth between editor and correspondent that happens in every newsroom.\u201d A more generous interpretation of Weiss\u2019s tenure might be that her missteps have been due to a lack of experience. Could inexperience be the real problem?&nbsp;<\/strong>I think inexperience&nbsp;<em>is<\/em>&nbsp;the larger part of the problem. The most difficult thing for the staff is trying to make up for all of these missteps in terms of our production and the technical aspects of television. It\u2019s been enormously stressful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Another high-profile \u201c60 Minutes\u201d host, Anderson Cooper, declined to renew his contract this year. And at the end of his final show, he went on air and said, \u201cI hope \u201860 Minutes\u2019 remains \u201860 Minutes.\u2019\u201d That was seen as a swipe at Bari Weiss. Did you talk to Anderson about why he did not renew his contact and his reasons for leaving?\u00a0<\/strong>I did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>How did you receive that news?&nbsp;<\/strong>Correspondents don\u2019t resign from \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d It\u2019s the greatest job in the world. There is nothing else to aspire to. So, if a person of Anderson Cooper\u2019s stature decides that he has to leave the broadcast, that\u2019s an indication that he has found his role there untenable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>It\u2019s been reported that Bari Weiss was upset that Anderson Cooper\u2019s comments had aired in that way.&nbsp;<\/strong>That\u2019s my understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Do you think that was part of the reason executive producer Tanya Simon was let go?&nbsp;<\/strong>Yes. My understanding from people directly involved in that interaction is that Bari Weiss was quite livid that Anderson Cooper was allowed to say those things and that she, Bari, was not consulted beforehand, which in our normal course of business would not have been done anyway. I believe that was part of the reason Tanya was let go. But she wasn\u2019t let go for cause. She was let go to create a space for the new person, Nick Bilton, to come in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tanya was completely blindsided by this. She was told that she was coming into a meeting to discuss the past season and the next season. She walks in; she sits down. And Tom starts the meeting with, the nature of this meeting has changed. We\u2019re letting you go. And told her she was fired and had to get out of her office by 5 o\u2019clock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Can I give you a little bit of background? The Simon family is legendary at CBS News. Her father was a famous Vietnam correspondent and then Bob Simon covered every single war, everywhere in the world throughout his entire career. I was with him in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1990. We would stand on the roof of the hotel and watch the missiles come in. He taught me how to be a war correspondent. And then Tanya Simon comes in. She\u2019s at the broadcast 30 years. There is no respect for that. Get out of the office by five o\u2019clock? What company in the world treats their precious people that way? [Tears up] Tanya Simon spent her whole childhood waiting for the call that her father was dead, never knowing if she would ever see him again. Her whole childhood. Get out by 5 o\u2019clock. Make of that what you will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>I can hear how much this has hurt you.&nbsp;<\/strong>Yes, it\u2019s like your spouse being murdered. I don\u2019t care about me. It\u2019s not about me. I am not emotional about this because I have lost this job. I\u2019ve done it for a long time. I\u2019ve had the greatest experiences. But the people I leave behind, treated in this way? That breaks my heart, and it\u2019s going to take me a long time to get over it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2026\/06\/07\/magazine\/07mag-interview-pelley-03\/07mag-interview-pelley-03-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&amp;auto=webp&amp;disable=upscale\" alt=\"\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Bari Weiss at the CBS News\/Politico reception before the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington in April.Credit&#8230;Mary Kouw\/CBS News, via Associated Press<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>One of the arguments that Bari Weiss has made about \u201c60 Minutes\u201d and CBS News is that they need to be brought into the modern era. Nick Bilton also said in that staff meeting with you that \u201cbroadcast is an ice cube that is melting.\u201d Do you think they have a point, even if \u201c60 Minutes\u201d is reaching a huge audience now? Does its metabolism, the kinds of correspondents that it has have to change to reach a younger audience that interacts with media in a completely different way?&nbsp;<\/strong>Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous. It\u2019s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They\u2019ve just discovered the internet, and they\u2019re running around telling everybody how important it is. At CBS News, yeah, join the fight. We started our first \u201c60 Minutes\u201d online show, \u201c60 Minutes Overtime,\u201d in 2010. I shoot TikTok verticals, or I used to shoot TikTok verticals on every assignment. We\u2019re there. We\u2019re everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Nick Bilton sent a very conciliatory note to the staff this past week.&nbsp;<\/strong>At last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>He promised editorial independence. He praised some of your longtime colleagues, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, Jon Wertheim. And while we\u2019ve been talking, those three released a statement that&nbsp;<\/strong><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/06\/05\/business\/media\/60-minutes-cbs-stahl-whitaker-wertheim.html\">they are staying<\/a><\/strong><strong>&nbsp;at \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d How does that make you feel?&nbsp;<\/strong>Same reason I was staying. I haven\u2019t talked to them. I assume it\u2019s the same reason. And we have had conversations before this about staying to maintain the principles of the broadcast. If we leave, we can\u2019t help. There have been other times \u2014 when Anderson left, when others were fired \u2014 that we could have stormed into a meeting and quit, but those very distinguished correspondents and myself did have conversations about this and decided that we were better working on the inside, and that we could influence things for the better. And we did. And it was my intention to stay and do exactly that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Do you think they can trust those assurances?&nbsp;<\/strong>No. I would venture to say that trust is broken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed?\u00a0<\/strong>Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she\u2019s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television\u2019s not her thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, \u201cThere\u2019s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.\u201d I\u2019m going to decline because I don\u2019t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, \u201cOh, that\u2019s not for me, I don\u2019t know how to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>President Trump reacted to your being fired.&nbsp;<\/strong>Did he?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>He went on a podcast and called you a stiff.&nbsp;<\/strong>I\u2019m surprised that the president of the United States would bother to notice, but please tell me. I\u2019m not aware of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>He said you were part of this gang of \u201cstupid, crooked people that don\u2019t care about your country.\u201d&nbsp;<\/strong>Stupid? I can take that. Stiff? Yeah, probably. Don\u2019t care about the country? I\u2019ve never worn the uniform. But I\u2019ve been in combat for this country, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kuwait. I\u2019ve been shot at, spent nights in foxholes filling up with water in the desert. I\u2019m not aware that the president of the United States has ever done any of those things for his country. Please correct me if I\u2019m wrong. You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions that the president used about me might be applicable, not that one. [Tears up] There is no democracy without journalism. It can\u2019t be done. That is why I am a journalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Sign up for The Interview&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong>Hosts David Marchese and Lulu Garcia-Navarro talk to the world\u2019s most fascinating people.&nbsp;Get it sent to your inbox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Last few questions.&nbsp;<\/strong>Fox News is going to just run the parts where I\u2019m crying and say I\u2019m a lunatic. [Laughs]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Scott, you joined CBS as a reporter in 1989. As I was preparing for this interview, I was thinking about how the story of modern CBS is the story of your own career, too. When you look back, what do you hope your departure does? What do you hope will happen now?<\/strong>\u00a0My hope is that the leadership of Paramount will say to themselves, this isn\u2019t working. We have broadcasts that almost don\u2019t get on the air. We have respected journalists saying that there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over another. We have a broadcast that is among the most important in America. The most successful in the history of all television. It was doing great, so why are we making these changes? We need adult supervision and at the moment we don\u2019t have it. We have people who\u2019ve been installed in these jobs who through no fault of their own have no experience in television. They don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing. And there\u2019s a subtle political bias that I\u2019ve never seen at \u201c60 Minutes\u201d before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It\u2019s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow \u201cThe Interview\u201d on&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/the-interview\/id1624946521\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Apple Podcasts<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/7cDVEBbn8tM4vCEFM4TFA2?si=ccb3bbaadb75485f\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Spotify<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@theinterviewpodcast\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>YouTube<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.iheart.com\/podcast\/326-the-interview-97152890\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>iHeartRadio<\/em><\/a><em>or&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/music.amazon.com\/podcasts\/3c7db6c5-3de8-4bf0-b8b4-c540dc623cb7\/the-interview\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Amazon Music<\/em><\/a><em>. Follow us on&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/theinterview_nyt\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Instagram<\/em><\/a><em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tiktok.com\/@theinterview_nyt\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\"><em>TikTok<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Source photograph for photo illustration above: Michele Crowe\/CBS News, via Getty Images<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/by\/lulu-garcia-navarro\">Lulu Garcia-Navarro<\/a>&nbsp;is a writer and co-host of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/column\/the-interview\">The Interview<\/a>, a series focused on interviewing the world\u2019s most fascinating people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>See more on:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/topic\/cbs-news\">CBS News<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/topic\/person\/anderson-cooper\">Anderson Cooper<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back to News By\u00a0Lulu Garcia-Navarro June 7, 2026 It\u2019s hard to overstate the impact of \u201c60 Minutes\u201d on journalism. It\u2019s the most-watched television-news program in America. Since its debut on CBS in 1968, it\u2019s been the home of some of the most-storied broadcast journalists, from Mike Wallace and Ed Bradley to Lesley Stahl, Anderson Cooper [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18219"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18220,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18219\/revisions\/18220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}