FCC chair Brendan Carr is pushing back against Scott Pelley saying in a new profile with The New York Times that he did not believe he’d be fired after an intense meeting with 60 Minutes‘ new executive producer, Nick Bilton, on Monday.
Carr responded to an X post made by conservative journalist Byron York, which clipped a piece of Pelley’s Sunday interview with the Times where he noted him potentitally being let go after the fiery meeting was the “furthest thing from [Pelley’s] mind.”
“One of the reasons why trust in media is so low is because many legacy journalists are completely out of touch,” Carr wrote Sunday. “You could not get away with that behavior at any run of the mill job. It is revealing to see how blind some are to that.”
Pelley was fired on Tuesday after the meeting with Bilton, where he argued that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is “murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place; she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.” He also told Bilton that he had “slender qualifications” for the job, and suggested he was not welcome at the flagship newsmagazine.
Elsewhere in Pelley’s interview with the Times, the former 60 Minutes correspondent said he was shocked by the dismissal of EP Tanya Simon (whom Bilton is succeeding), as well as the firing of correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi as staff headed into the meeting.
“Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired,” said Pelley. “At the same moment, we are informed of our new executive producer. His name is Nick Bilton. I’m 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 60 Minutes.”
After the news was announced that he was let go from 60 Minutes, Pelley released a statement where he accused Weiss of “incompetence and unprofessionalism,” and claimed that CBS News management “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”
During a Wednesday morning call with staff, Weiss pushed back against Pelley, arguing that he broke “trust and mutual respect.”
After a hectic week, Pelley took to Instagram on Saturday, where he thanked those who have shown him support amid his 60 Minutes firing.
“To all of you who have been so kind, you are the wind in my sails,” the former correspondent wrote in the caption of the post, which featured a photo of himself behind the wheel of a sailboat. “So deeply grateful.”
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