CBS Fires Scott Pelley For Telling Bari Weiss The Truth
from the the-patient-died-on-the-operating-table dept
Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison hired blogtroller Bari Weiss to turn what was left of CBS News into a right wing safe space for oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu. If the patient died during surgery, I don’t think Ellison would lose any sleep. But I do think Ellison hoped that Weiss could at least turn CBS News into a viral, right wing propaganda vessel certain people actually wanted to watch.
But Weiss’ tenure has been a bumbling mess on all fronts. MAGA folks aren’t interested in CBS News’ bland agitprop. And most existing viewers have been running for the exits, resulting in CBS News recently seeing its worst ratings in a quarter century. Her clumsy attempted censorship of stories critical of the president have also caused a mass exodus of any actual remaining journalists.
Those who are left are even more pissed after Weiss recently fired 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon, her deputy, and two correspondents (Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega). In her place she put Nick Bilton, a former tech journalist and documentary filmmaker with no broadcast experience.
Bilton’s a fairly typical fail upward type remembered by many in tech journalism for the time he tried to take credit for the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal:
His introduction as the new boss of 60 Minutes did not go well.
Leaked audio of a recent meeting between Bilton and CBS News staff was dropped in the lap of the New York Times and Status. In it, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program, told Bilton he had “slender” qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program:
“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
There are several parts of the meeting where Bilton and his staff clearly try to shut Pelley up, quite unsuccessfully:
CBS obviously didn’t take Pelley’s comments well and has now fired him. Pelley in response offered an even more blistering statement accusing Weiss and CBS News of “injecting falsehoods and bias” into his stories. After Weiss came in swinging an axe and dismantling 60 Minutes with a total disregard for journalism, history, or tact, she accused Pelley of creating a “hostile work environment”:
Weiss ran a small blog full of trolls and c-tier columnists whose primary purpose is to blow smoke up the ass of wealth and power and punch down and left. I genuinely do think Ellison hired Weiss thinking she had the savvy to revolutionize and modernize CBS News for the social media era. But Weiss has shown repeatedly that she’s marginally competent and has the media savvy of a 90-year-old Conservative man.
Rich Republicans certainly do love to destroy and attack journalism that critiques wealth and power. But they don’t just destroy their targets. They’ll purchase a traditional news brand or communications platform, then leverage any remaining reputation to seed the public with lazy, oligarch-friendly agitprop (see: Newsweek, The Baltimore Sun, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Twitter, TikTok, CBS, and soon CNN).
In a country with fairly terrible media literacy standards, it takes most of the public years to notice anything has changed at these hijacked zombie publications and platforms, if they notice at all. If you are cogent enough to notice and vocalize any resistance, like Scott Pelley did, you’re treated as a problematic rabble rouser undermining company interests.
If Weiss was competent, she’d make changes with some amount of subtlety resulting in a propaganda outlet that isn’t quite so ham-fisted. If she was competent, the end product at CBS News, however partisan, would already be something that was at least grabbing ad eyeballs. She’s not competent, or subtle. And the backlash is proportional.
Everybody’s piling on. Former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens praised Pelley and hinted at Weiss being a “fraud.” Santiago Campos, a recent student journalist recipient of the Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship, trashed Weiss and CBS News in a recent award speech:
“While I want to thank CBS News for funding this generous gift towards my education, I want to also acknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship,” Santiago Campos said onstage to enthusiastic applause from the audience.”
Management has already started to scale back Weiss’ responsibilities, and I strongly suspect she will be replaced by somebody worse (but better for ratings) by the end of the summer.
Filed Under: 60 minutes, agitprop, bari weiss, cbs news, journalism, larry ellison, media, media literacy, news, nick bilton
Companies: cbs, cbs news
Comments on “CBS Fires Scott Pelley For Telling Bari Weiss The Truth”
facts matter, except to MAGA.
“tact” or “fact”?
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Either will do as something MAGA has a dim view of.
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MAGA loves tact when they’re glazing dictators.
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You’re thinking “Tack”, as in their lips are tacked to a dictators ass.
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whynotboth dot gif
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60 minutes has been a disgrace for decades and Scott Pelley is a small part of why that is.
No, you do NOT get to trash talk your boss and your boss’s boss in a all-hands meeting without getting fired, you absolute retards. There’s nothing special about being a journalist that changes this.
Still a lot better than VICE, innit?
No seriously, none of that is true. CBS paid $150M for The Free Press because it was very, very successful. And Bari Weiss was a renowned journalist and editor before that. So you’re just straight up lying.
But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if Pelley was RIGHT (he was not), you just don’t get to insult your bosses like that, in public.
Anyway, Pelley is a piece of shit and it’s great that he’s gone.
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I bet you’ve never once watched a full episode of 60 Minutes.
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I did, in the 90s. That’s about the last time it was watchable.
Retard.
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Hey, so, Mike? Any reason you’re seriously not putting this guy’s stuff in the spamfilter permanently now? Like, I get letting his shit through for “this will be instructive on how to argue against these points” purposes and all. But c’mon, man—the overuse of that slur alone is as bad as everything Hyman Rosen said to end up getting his account shunted into a perma-filter. And he’s the only person here using that word. It should be disqualifying from community interaction here at a bare minimum.
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Just to be clear, The Free Press was not “very, very, successful.” It was just moderately successful. The best estimate I can find says it made $20mil per year (with some fairly generous assumptions) meaning that it sold for at least 7.5x earnings which is insane for a media property.
And no Bari Weiss was never a successful journalist. She literally never did any hard journalism. From day one she was an opinion writer.
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That is the very definition of successful. Sorry you retarded.
Re: Re: Pure subjectivism because otherwise they'd have to learn something
Maga doesn’t know the difference between journalism and opinion any more than they know the difference between science and opinion
or the law and opinion
or history and opinion
or etc etc etc
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The Free Press is journalism.
60 minutes (at least until this week) is not.
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Any claim that can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
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Because conservative billionaires don’t have a long track record of subsidising or paying over the odds for propaganda outlets that collapse the second the money spigot is turned off because people aren’t that interested in paying for their content. How’s The Daily Wire doing these days? I heard they were getting millions of views and on the verge of becoming the conservative Netflix.
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Not that great after Viktor Orban lost his election. Weird how that works. 🤔
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So….the Free Press was successful because billionaires were subscribing? Like, all, 400 of them?
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If you believe the subscriber numbers were organic, you must also believe the bulk bought copies of books by conservative talking heads and politicians that are openky bought in bulk were also bought by hundreds of thousands of people, or that the money that flooded in to Tenet media from Russia also came from hundreds of thousands of people, or that Breitbart was founded by plucky upstart journalist Andrew Brietbast pulling himselfup by his bootstraps selling newsletters on a street corner, or that TPUSA was funded entirely by Charlie Kirk’s gumption and business savvy, or the mysterious multimillion dollar bitcoin donations Alex Jones received each time Infowars needed a cash infusion just came from fans, or that the buyout of Warner is coming from the profits raised by Paramount, CBS and Skydance’s great business decisions and massively successful movies, or that the Daily Wire was just super gosh darn popular and wasn’t buying views and didn’t suddenly fall off a cliff when it backers withdrew, or that Rumble is a big new platform and doesn’t inflate viewcounts for the right wing scumbags being paid by Peter Thiel to post there… Also the free press was funded by a rogues gallery of shitheads from the tech and investing world and Epstein associates like Marc Andersen, David Sachs, Bobby Kotick, fake centrist Howard ‘I’m going to spend $500 million to run as an independent spoiler candidate should democratic voters pick someone to the left of Bill Clinton, also no unions’ Schultz… So yeah.
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Using the hard-r word in 2026 is certainly a choice.
Also, blatant incorrect revisionist history aside, Pelley was right to trash talk. He had a right to demand answers about the unjustified firing of his colleagues, which Bilton desperately tried to avoid while he and Forelle demanded civility out of him. Bilton didn’t have the fucking balls to defend his boss or the previous firings, all he and Weiss could do was hide behind “civility” and “respect” (which really means “Pelley didn’t unconditionally bow to authority like a good stooge should”).
If civility means rolling over, then fuck civility.
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That, uh…that doesn’t refer to the slur he used. I mean, it refers to a slur, yes, but not that one.
That said:
Amen.
I saw a car with only a single bumper sticker on it recently: “Luigi”
Techdirt should probably be concerned if those bumper stickers really take off after the mid-terms. It’s definitely not how they want to get conservatives to back off or may even backfire (unlikely since the end of February)
But it’s people like Bilton and Weiss who probably should be up at night and considering when their security officers start showing up with those stickers on their vehicles or people start slapping them on conservative vehicles instead of keying them.
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Glad that Mario’s brother is finally getting some recognition for helping to take down the evil boss in the mushroom kingdom.
Yes, 90-year-old conservative men, famous for…being bad at running conservative news outlets.
I feel like that analogy probably could have used a second pass.
Re: What CBS deserves
But Weiss has shown repeatedly that she’s marginally competent…” Those are some tiny margins.
I kind of hope a post-Bari CBS tries to get him back only to get shut down. He’s got to have “fuck you” money at this point, and what’s the good in having it if’n you don’t get to tell people “fuck you”?
No more NFL
I call on everyone to boycott CBS. I’ll miss the Football Games this fall, but now I must boycott both CBS and FOX.
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If the American media were a meritocracy, Bari Weiss would be selling ads for dying local newspapers, but since her harassment campaign against Arab professors got media coverage, she reaped the benefits of the pro conservative DEI programs that saw the liberal media cut it’s own throat from the late nineties onward, destroying their own credibility in an attempt to reach the fox news audience.
Pelley was right to trash talk. He had a right to demand answers about the unjustified firing of his colleagues, which Bilton desperately tried to avoid while he and Forelle demanded civility out of him. Bilton didn’t have the fucking balls to defend his boss or the previous firings, all he and Weiss could do was hide behind “civility” and “respect” (which really means “Pelley didn’t unconditionally bow to authority like a good stooge should”).
Zohran Mamdani once said that “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty.”
Also, another unattributed but insightful quote I’ve come across in relation to all of this: “Sometimes people use ‘respect’ to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”. And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”. And they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.”
Bilton and Weiss hide behind civility and decorum and got mad that Pelley refused to roll over. “Respect” is earned, and Pelley reminded them they hadn’t earned it, which is the most unforgivable sin in their eyes.