CBS
After nearly 40 years at the company, longtime 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley has been fired. Pelley was unceremoniously fired in the late hours of Tuesday, June 2.
The longtime CBS News correspondent and former CBS Evening News anchor — who spent 37 years at the network — was fired Tuesday after a confrontation with new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton earlier this week.
Longtime 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley issues multiple statement after being fired by CBS “for cause”
Just a few hours after his dismissal, Scott Pelley issued a statement that accused CBS News management of instructing him to inject falsehoods into stories, letting politicians hand-pick the correspondents who interview them, and allowing the show to nearly not air at all due to their incompetence.
“New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” Pelley wrote in his statement. “I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.”
Pelley framed the entire situation as Paramount CEO David Ellison sacrificing 60 Minutes’ legacy to curry favor with President Donald Trump ahead of his pending $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, and said that Bari Weiss was brought in to “kill” the company.
Scott Pelley’s full statement: “The waste is heartbreaking.”https://t.co/EX2IinuLlv pic.twitter.com/uHoMNSceEn
— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) June 3, 2026
During a staff meeting on Monday, Bilton’s first day on the job, Pelley publicly challenged his qualifications and accused Bari Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes.
“She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that,” Pelley said in front of additional staff members.
The next day, CBS announced that Pelley had been fired for cause, with Bilton’s statement saying:
“Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” while calling Pelley’s comment a “performative display of hostility.”
In an editorial call on Wednesday morning, CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss told staffers that an attempt was made to “find a way back” with Pelley and this his firing was “the path he chose.
“Despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways. We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose,” Weiss said, according to the New York Times.
After Weiss comments to the CBS staff were published in The Times, Pelley released additional comments that detailed his account of the events and claimed he specifically asked why fellow 60 Minutes colleagues Tanya Simon, Cecilia Vega, and Sharyn Alfonsi, and was told those questions would not be answered.
“I’m saddened to see the transcript of the CBS News morning editorial meeting. Bari Weiss knows what she said is not true. In the meeting on Tuesday, in which I was effectively fired, there was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back,’ as Weiss said in the editorial meeting,” Pelley said.
“At no point did anyone in the Tuesday meeting suggest that there could be steps taken by either side that would lead to a resolution. Weiss and Tom Cibrowski were openly hostile from the start. ‘Firing’ was raised by Cibrowski in the first 15 seconds. No CBS executive, at any time, suggested ‘a way back.’ To say so now is disingenuous. And they know it,” he continued.
“No constructive dialogue was allowed by the CBS executives at any point. I was stonewalled for about 10 minutes and then, for no apparent reason, ‘This conversation is over.’ I am pained that the staff of CBS News was misled in the Wednesday morning conference call. These executives cannot gain the trust of the staff with lies. This is antithetical to everything we stand for and reveals contempt for what journalists do.”
Scott Pelley just issued a statement on Bari’s remarks this morning: https://t.co/RntFfL7DBp pic.twitter.com/FYQVk6mUyG
— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) June 3, 2026
Pelley won a record 48 Emmy Awards, four duPont-Columbia Silver Batons, and three George Foster Peabody Awards during his time at 60 Minutes, with half of all major awards won by the program during his time going to stories he reported.
During his career at CBS, Pelley reported on September 11, wars in Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine, Syria, and Sudan, interviewed Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama (but not Donald Trump), and anchored CBS Evening News from 2011 to 2017.