The Media Research Center wasn’t done celebrating the firing of “60 Minutes” correspondent and complaining about the fact that most people do not hate him the way the MRC does. Curtis Houck grumbled in a June 3 post with the sneering headline “PAY ATTENTION TO ME”:
Fired longtime CBS correspondent and host Scott Pelley — who believes he’s on par with American war heroes — sought to keep his aircraft-carrier-sized ego and farcical martyrdom alive Wednesday with a second statement about his firing over his ambush Monday of new 60 Minutes boss, Nick Bilton. This time, he said news reports about Wednesday morning’s editorial meeting in which editor-in-chief Bari Weiss addressed Pelley’s ouster was filled with “lies” and “antithetical to everything we stand for[.]”
Pelley even said Weiss’s description of events “reveal[ed] contempt for what journalists do.”
The media reporting class each had their own version of how this daily call went down.
[…]As for Pelley, he first declared without a scintilla of irony that he was “saddened to see the transcript of the CBS News morning editorial meeting.”
For someone who had to have known he was playing with fire and a reputation of being an attention-seeking missile and likely was behind some of the leaks about Monday’s team-wide scolding he delivered to Bilton, that’s rich.
Pelley asserted Weiss’s claims CBS News executives tried to work with Pelley on “find[ing] a way back” to understanding was “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. 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,” he claimed.
He droned on: “Weiss and [CBS News President] 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.”
Now, Pelley was being purposefully obtuse.
Bilton explained late Tuesday in both his termination letter to Pelley and a message to staff, the new team at CBS News and 60 Minutes made repeated overtures to Pelley, knowing how acrimonious things were likely to become with one of the network’s longest-tenured personalities.
But, as numerous stories revealed this week, the olive branches were all ignored by Pelley. Thus, it’s egregious to demand reconciliation after he scorched them in public and tried to burn the proverbial house down.
Houck offered no evidence he tried to verify Bilton’s claims, or that he has any mission other than to trash Pelley.
Nicholas Spinnato grumbled that another network talked about Pelley’s firing:
After the firing of 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, MS NOW dedicated much of its special primary election night coverage, helmed by Rachel Maddow with panels full of fellow nighttime opinion hosts like Jen Psaki and Stephanie Ruhle, to the Pelley news. During one segment, Psaki dramatically read from the former CBS employee’s first released statement with commentary intertwined throughout its reading.
As election coverage reached close to midnight, Maddow, with a coarse voice, handed the reading of Pelley’s statement to Psaki. It began with an explanation of the growth of 60 Minutes before he began his attacks on the new ownership of CBS and claimed the show, “lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause.”
Psaki then read more from Pelley, who alleged that the network told him to “inject falsehoods,” before she gave her own commentary:
[…]Ruhle exclaimed, “How does the rest of CBS News come to work tomorrow?” The soon-to-be mid-morning host on the network then claimed the changes to 60 Minutes were the equivalent of Elon Musk’s DOGE: “They’re DOGEing CBS, right?”
At the end of the segment on Pelley, Psaki gave a defense of the fired correspondents.
She called “preemptive BS” on those who would say that Pelley and Vega were “products of the left.” Psaki then added: “I had no idea what their politics were.”
In case anyone wondered what Pelley’s politics were, explore this MRC compilation of his worst and Vega’s moments of left-wing bias at CBS.
To close, Maddow implored her employer, MS NOW, to hire Pelley as she asked, “Scott Pelley, if you’re watching, come work for us.”
[…]While it seemed likely Pelley may be an avid MS NOW viewer of shows hosted by the likes of Maddow and Psaki, it seemed much more likely he is poised to take the resistance podcaster route on Substack instead, just like Jim Acosta, Katie Couric, Scott McFarlane, and Terry Moran before him.
Jorge Bonilla whined that Pelley’s former CBS co-workers mourned his firing:
How many people can walk into their workplace, defecate on the new management, insult their new direct supervisor, and get immediately fired for cause right before getting a glowing sendoff on the way out? Well, there’s Scott Pelley, apparently, given the sendoff he just got from the CBS Evening News.
The Evening News ran an extended A-block in order to give Pompous Pelley a five-minute sendoff. The sendoff was bifurcated into two segments, the first being a process piece on the runup to Pelley’s firing and aftermath, which was handled by national correspondent Jim Axelrod[.] […]
Care is taken to report on the conflict that led to the firing, but with great deference to Pelley. Anchor Tony Dokoupil handled the second part: a gushy farewell with a “best of” reel:
[…]Our own Curtis Houck often quips that CBS News ain’t NewsMax, and it shows here. This sendoff would’ve easily been shut down were the management team as MAGA-adjacent as the left and their media lapdogs want to portray them to be.
This glowing sendoff is far better than what Pelley deserved- especially after blowing the place up, insulting his immediate chain of command, and then leaking the details of the blowup so as to cast CBS in the worst possible light en route to the dopamine crack hits provided by certain martyrdom coverage. You expect to see this type of sendoff after death, not after the tail end of a work dispute.
Of course Bonilla thinks Pelley got treated well — he’s a Pelley-hater, after all. And he’s carrying the water of Bari Weiss by rushing to her defense.
Comedy cop Alex Christy complained the Pelley’s firing was the subject of late-night TV shows:
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and NBC’s The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon denounced CBS for firing 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley after his meltdown during an internal meeting where he viciously attacked his new bosses. Both alleged, with no evidence, that CBS is moving dramatically rightward while making the same quip about Pelley being replaced by Stephen Colbert’s replacement, Byron Allen.
Kimmel began by claiming, “Last night, the Trump suck-ups at CBS fired a great and deeply respected journalist, Scott Pelley, from his job at 60 Minutes because he stood up for truth and integrity at a show that’s been the gold standard for broadcast journalism for 57 years. Pelley had had enough after the clowns who now run that show fired reporters Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, along with the executive producer, Tonya Simon, and replaced Tonya Simon with a guy who has no experience in TV news, and that was it for Scott Pelley.”
In reality, Pelley was fired for acting like a petulant child despite being a 68-year old man. However, Kimmel suggested his outburst was merited, “He said, ‘The collapse of values at the top has become untenable,’ and he let them have it in a staff meeting, right to the new guy’s face. So, last night they fired him. 60 Minutes will be replaced by new episodes of Reporters Unleashed.”
Trying to tie it all back to Trump, Kimmel concluded, “And the president, of course, applauded this decision. He said Scott Pelley is part of a game of ‘crooked, stupid people.’ Different from the gang of crooked, stupid people he’s a part of.”
Back on NBC, Fallon kicked off his show by declaring, “CBS just fired longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley after he criticized his new bosses at the network. Yeah. The story gets more bizarre because today they announced they’re replacing Scott Pelley with Byron Allen.”
Christy then defended the new head of “60 Minutes” and other changes:
The “guy” with “no experience in TV news” that Kimmel alluded to and that Fallon implied would make 60 Minutes more conservative is Nick Bilton, who comes from Vanity Fair, which is not exactly a MAGA publication. While there, Bilton focused heavily on tech issues with a heavy focus on AI and Elon Musk. Like the rest of CBS’s news coverage, the idea that it might become slightly less liberal does not mean it is turning into an arm of the White House’s communications team.
Christy did not point out that Kimmel is apparently right in noting that Bilton has no experience in TV news. And he offered no evidence that just being “slightly less liberal” is the goal of Weiss and Bilton.