CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, jettisoning one of the network’s best-known journalists in a clash over the future of “60 Minutes,” the country’s top-rated news program.
Mr. Pelley, 68, a “60 Minutes” correspondent and a former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” joined the network in 1989. At a staff meeting on Monday, he accused the network’s editor in chief, Bari Weiss, of “murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” citing the ouster last week of the program’s leadership team and two on-air correspondents.
“We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Nick Bilton, the tech journalist who was hired last week as the new “60 Minutes” executive producer, wrote in a memo to the show’s staff on Tuesday night.
CBS News declined to comment. In a formal letter to Mr. Pelley, which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Bilton wrote that the correspondent had been “terminated for cause effective immediately.”
Mr. Pelley, in a telephone interview on Tuesday evening shortly after he was fired, said he had devoted decades of his life to “60 Minutes,” which he said he still cared about deeply.
“I have been in combat in Afghanistan,” Mr. Pelley said. “I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”
The firing of Mr. Pelley is among the most consequential moves of Ms. Weiss’s rocky tenure at CBS. And it is almost certain to spike tensions that have coursed through the network for months.
It also raises the stakes of Ms. Weiss’s surprising decision to replace the entire leadership team at “60 Minutes,” CBS News’s most successful franchise, and hire Mr. Bilton, who has no experience in broadcast TV, to oversee the show. The program’s viewership was up 9 percent this past season from a year prior, and the show is routinely among the nation’s highest-rated weekly broadcasts, according to Nielsen.
Those viewers are accustomed to familiar faces like Mr. Pelley, who has contributed to the program since 2004. The “60 Minutes” staff prides itself on autonomy, and it is not clear how the show’s production team may react to the firing of Mr. Pelley.
At the staff meeting on Monday, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley repeatedly pressed Mr. Bilton about the network’s decision to fire Tanya Simon, the show’s previous executive producer. He also told Mr. Bilton that he had “slender” qualifications to oversee the show and that he would “never be welcome” at “60 Minutes.”
In his letter to Mr. Pelley on Tuesday, Mr. Bilton expressed his deep frustration with those remarks.
“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” Mr. Bilton wrote. He called it a “performative display of hostility” that “demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.”
Mr. Pelley, asked about the letter in the interview on Tuesday evening, said Mr. Bilton’s missive “betrays a complete misunderstanding of what we work for and what we live for at ‘60 Minutes.’”
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Pelley sent a statement to The Times that assailed the new leadership of CBS News, writing that “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc” at the network.” He added, “The collapse of values at the top has become untenable.”
Mr. Pelley also wrote that senior managers at CBS News had pressured him to insert bias into stories for “60 Minutes” this past season, though he did not provide details about specific segments.
Mr. Bilton must now take charge of a weekly program that has lost four of its on-air correspondents in the past month. Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were fired last week, and Anderson Cooper voluntarily left the show at the end of the season in May.
Ms. Weiss was appointed last year by CBS’s owner, the tech scion David Ellison, with a mandate to revamp the news division for the digital era. An opinion journalist with little experience in broadcast television, Ms. Weiss was also a longtime critic of the legacy media.
Her early interactions with the “60 Minutes” staff led to some awkwardness. In a meeting in October, Ms. Weiss bluntly asked the show’s journalists why the country believed they were biased. In December, she pulled a segment about a Salvadoran prison shortly before it aired, saying it needed more reporting. Ms. Alfonsi, the correspondent, accused Ms. Weiss of a “political” move. (The segment later aired in full, with additional comments from the Trump administration.)
Mr. Pelley’s future had seemed up in the air since his standoff with Mr. Bilton on Monday.
Leaders at CBS News set a meeting with Mr. Pelley on Tuesday intending to find a path forward after Monday’s fireworks. But the meeting turned contentious and ended with no clear resolution, according to three people with knowledge of the private gathering. In attendance were Mr. Pelley, Ms. Weiss, Mr. Bilton and Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News.
Mr. Pelley said in the interview that Ms. Weiss would not answer his questions about why the network had decided to fire Ms. Simon, Ms. Alfonsi and Ms. Vega.
Ms. Weiss’s behavior, he said, “was cold and callous and beneath the dignity of CBS News.”
After his meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Pelley said, he returned to the “60 Minutes” offices. Staff members had gathered, awaiting word of his fate, but hours passed with no answer. He eventually urged the staff to return home, then left the building himself.
