FAFO!! Scott Pelley FIRED from 60 Minutes!

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:00]This is Scott Py, a longtime correspondent on CBS News's 60 Minutes.

[00:00:06]On May 28th, two of the show's correspondents, Cecilia Vega and Sharon Alfonsi, were fired from the broadcast along with executive producer Tanya Simon. I No one saw the Black Thursday massacre coming. This is our entire senior staff. People beloved Tanya Simon, our executive producer. She's the boss. She's the first woman ever to be executive producer of 60 Minutes. The first woman ever. And it only took the Champions of Equality at CBS News almost six decades to make that happen. And of course, she just happened to be the daughter of legendary CBS correspondent Bob Simon. But wow, shattering the glass ceiling one legacy nepism higher at a time. CBS leadership says that they tried to get in touch with you to talk about all of those changes and you didn't speak to them. Why not?

[00:01:05]>> I'm almost 69 years old and if I've learned one thing in life, it is not to reflexively react when you feel that way. I'm too emotionally wrought up. I'm going to say the wrong thing. I'm not going to hear what they have to say.

[00:01:21]This isn't the moment. Scott P didn't want to reflexively react or say the wrong thing. Instead, his brilliant strategy was to ignore management entirely and save all that pentup emotional rage for a very public unhinged meltdown days later. That's a family at 60 Minutes when somebody wipes out murders a large number of your family members.

[00:01:55]People are hurt and shocked in disbelief.

[00:02:01]MURDER WIPED OUT. THESE PEOPLE WERE given pink slips and likely massive severance packages, not firing squads.

[00:02:09]The melodrama is off the charts.

[00:02:12]>> And at the same moment that that happens, we are informed of our new executive producer.

[00:02:21]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.

[00:02:45]>> Oh, the horror. Someone from outside the insular elitist media bubble WAS BROUGHT IN TO SHAKE up a dinosaur format. The absolute nerve of CBS to try and modernize. What had happened a couple of days before the meeting was so critical.

[00:03:01]Nick Bilton wrote an email to the staff sort of introducing himself and it was so insulting to the staff and so insulting uh to the history of 60 Minutes. I'm paraphrasing here. He was excited to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondence.

[00:03:28]And when I saw that, I thought, "Okay, they're going to fire all of us eventually.

[00:03:35]>> That's the plan." He put it in writing for all of us to see.

[00:03:39]>> Nick Bilton didn't say anything about firing more people. What he actually said was, "I have a notebook full of ideas. Some are about the show itself.

[00:03:50]Some are about the next generation of correspondents."

[00:03:54]Builtin was literally just talking about expanding the team, but Scott P took that as a deeply personal attack. He He's not even considering that they need to hire at least three correspondents to replace the three that just left. For a guy that got paid millions of dollars to be an elite globe trotting investigative journalist, his deductive reasoning skills are genuinely embarrassing.

[00:04:18]So, as I mentioned earlier, Scott Py had the brilliant idea to have an unhinged meltdown during Nick Builton's first meeting with 60 Minute Staff. And Lulu Garcia Navaro from the Times asked why.

[00:04:32]>> Why did you decide to have that first interaction with your new boss in public and not behind closed doors?

[00:04:37]>> It wasn't in public. It was behind closed doors.

[00:04:41]>> I was with my family in a closed room.

[00:04:46]None of this was meant to be public.

[00:04:49]>> Mhm.

[00:04:50]>> And I'm waiting to see who comes in. And it's uh Nick Bilton and one of um Barry's deputies. No, Barry.

[00:05:02]People are a little shocked by this.

[00:05:06]As we're standing in there, Nick makes his way to the front of the room and does something absolutely jaw-dropping to me.

[00:05:18]He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone. He read from his phone. How dare he use modern technology to read notes instead of bringing his own personal makeup team and a teleprompter like a normal person >> in a room full of 50 heartbroken people.

[00:05:41]>> The callousness, the tone deafness of that you could hear the groan in the room when that happened. So, the ultimate insult to these delicate morning souls was a smartphone. Oh, the humanity.

[00:06:01]Um, they'd put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better.

[00:06:07]Hey, leave the bagels out OF THIS.

[00:06:09]BAGELS ARE INNOCENT. ANYWAY, the New York Times reported that in an extraordinary exchange, Mr. Repelli, his newscaster, Baritone, sometimes shaking in anger, told Nick Bilton, the new executive producer, that he had slender qualifications for his new job and questioned the network's commitment to the future of the program.

[00:06:31]>> Why did you feel compelled to speak up?

[00:06:33]>> It was fate.

[00:06:35]First of all, our entire senior staff had been wiped out. They're not there.

[00:06:38]And I looked around at my friends and colleagues in the room and realized I was the senior person.

[00:06:45]Um, only I could do it. None of them could be asked to take that risk.

[00:06:53]>> Or, and just hear me out here, Scott, you could have just sat quietly in your chair, eaten a bagel, and then kept your million-doll mouth shut.

[00:07:02]>> When I saw Nick Bilton's email, and then saw him reading to my brokenhearted people off his phone.

[00:07:14]Um, I felt that somebody had to stand up for the broadcast. Not just the broadcast, but the people.

[00:07:22]There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant.

[00:07:28]And the Emmy for the most dramatic performance in a news interview goes to >> and to have people running CBS news who don't know that have never felt that and don't understand it is a tragedy I never expected to see.

[00:07:52]Won't someone think of the pregnant war correspondents?

[00:07:56]The only tragedy here is that Scott Py thinks that corporate restructuring at a television network is comparable to a war crime. So, in that now infamous staff meeting, P then went after CBS News's editor-inchief Barry Weiss. She is murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and she's been doing exactly that.

[00:08:21]>> Then P went after both Barry Weiss and Nick Bilton. She has no qualifications for her job. You have slender qualifications for this job. The changes 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? But notice during his entire unhinged outburst that P doesn't offer one single metric, strategy, or idea to actually fix the network's news ratings.

[00:08:54]Py's entire plan seems to be, "Let us keep doing exactly what we've been doing for decades and leave us alone because we're an institution." Mr. P asked Mr. Bilton why he had accepted a position at a program knowing that you will never be welcome here. I care so deeply about this institution, Mr. Bilton said, to which Mr. P interrupted. Oh, please.

[00:09:21]Scott P setting the gold standard for journalistic integrity and workplace decorum. You definitely showed that guy with the iPhone who's boss, Scott.

[00:09:32]So during his interview with the New York Times, Scott Py accused editor-inchief Barry Weiss of pulling the concept of mainstream media bias completely out of thin air.

[00:09:44]She, I am told, said something to the effect of why do you think the country thinks you're biased, but she didn't offer any kind of a metric. You know, what's your metric?

[00:09:57]Why do why do you think so? Uh do you have a poll? Is there uh market research? What what are you talking about? Cuz we certainly didn't believe that. You need a metric.

[00:10:08]Have you looked at literally any Gallup poll on public trust in the media over the last decade? The mainstream media's approval rating is currently hovering somewhere between Congress and telemarketers.

[00:10:21]>> And we just felt that she was making statements that perhaps she couldn't back up.

[00:10:29]>> But everyone outside of the corporate news bubble knows exactly how the public views legacy media bias. In fact, we know exactly how biased they are because we have eyes and ears. It's too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution. All gone overnight for Christina Dry and Adam Dubard, fired this month in the chaotic shutdown of foreign aid distributed by the US Agency for International Development, USAD. USID was dismantled on Trump's order even though it was mandated by Congress and its funding was required by law. The president started by destroying USAID's image. In online posts, the administration smeared USID as quote a criminal organization.

[00:11:25]President Trump has said, quote, "Billions of dollars have been stolen.

[00:11:30]The whole thing is a fraud.

[00:11:33]>> It's utter nonsense."

[00:11:35]>> USAD spending in 2023 was 38 billion.

[00:11:39]That's less than 1% of the federal budget. The world's richest man had cut off assistance to the world's poorest families.

[00:11:48]>> But it does appear we may be headed towards some sort of a constitutional crisis.

[00:11:53]>> What happens then? Well, I don't know.

[00:11:56]>> No one knows.

[00:11:56]>> No one knows.

[00:11:58]>> Notice what's missing from that hard-hitting investigation. Literally any opposing viewpoint. Scott P didn't interview a single negative voice against USAD. And when Scott P wasn't entirely ignoring the other side of the aisle, he was relying on the highest journalistic standard of all, literal office gossip. One USID employee told us that a Doge engineer used the computer to give himself access to classified spaces in the building. That USAID employee told us they didn't know if the Doge engineer entered those spaces. But the employee said that is the problem with all of this. We don't know what's been compromised. We don't know what happened. Therefore, it must have been compromised probably. But wow, what a scoop.

[00:12:51]>> You have now accused Weiss of injecting, and I'm quoting here, falsehoods and bias into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. Can you tell me the nature of that um complaint?

[00:13:06]What did she specifically ask for? What story are you talking about? As I recall, that's February and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. Barry Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon.

[00:13:27]Two of the things in the email include, "Can we make the protesters look more violent?"

[00:13:35]Now, I'm paraphrasing. I don't have the quote, but that's what was communicated to me.

[00:13:41]>> So, let me get this straight. You are publicly accusing the editor-inchief of the network of injecting malicious falsehoods, and your rock solid evidence is a game of telephone about an email that you didn't even read yourself. I I don't know what she actually wrote, but I'm absolutely certain it was evil. The journalistic rigor here is it's just astounding.

[00:14:04]The other thing was Renee Good's car.

[00:14:08]You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

[00:14:14]This uh is not what you see on the video. The video showed that the officer wasn't standing in front of the car and she wasn't driving toward him. But that's what the president said about that and that's the way she wanted it described. So, according to Scott P, the video of the Renee Good shooting definitively proved that the agent wasn't in front of the car and that Barry Weiss was trying to force him to broadcast a complete lie to protect President Trump. Well, unfortunately for Scott, the internet is forever. Let's roll the tape of what actually aired on 60 Minutes and listen very, very closely to Scott Pelly's own narration. January 7th, Renee Good was blocking a street.

[00:15:00]As Good moved forward and to the right, an agent who had been in front of the car opened fire. Did she aim to hit the officers or simply drive away as others believe an agent who had been in front of the car? You can't make this stuff up. He just accused Barry Weiss of injecting falsehoods and in his own broadcast proves that she was the one telling the truth and that he's the one that's lying about it now.

[00:15:29]>> Did you change any language in the broadcast? Anything?

[00:15:34]>> Not that I recall based on her notes.

[00:15:40]There was a thumb on the scale for the president's version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.

[00:15:56]>> So Barry Weiss gives Scott P notes on a highly sensitive political story and he just decided to ignore him. Yet somehow Barry Weiss is the one that's putting her thumb on the scale. Not to mention the absurd claim that Scott Py never saw any political bias or influence in CBS News in 37 years. Sure. Jan, is it possible to see this as the system working? She had notes. You felt they didn't make sense to take the piece ran and there was no retaliation.

[00:16:30]>> Well, it was the interference that's a problem. Um, especially a story that's been approved by the top editors.

[00:16:39]>> The piece was approved by the top editors. Scott Barry Weiss is the top editor. That isn't interference. That's just your boss doing her job.

[00:16:50]>> Another high-profile 60 Minutes host, Anderson Cooper, uh, declined to renew his contract, too, this year. And at the end of his final show, he went on air and said, "I hope 60 Minutes remains 60 Minutes." That was seen as a swipe at Barry Weiss.

[00:17:09]>> I hope 60 Minutes remains 60 Minutes.

[00:17:12]There's very few things that have been around for as long as 60 Minutes has and maintain the quality that it has.

[00:17:18]>> It's been reported that Barry Weiss was upset that Anderson Cooper's comments had aired uh in that way.

[00:17:25]>> That's my understanding. Do you think that was part of the reason executive producer Tanya Simon was let go?

[00:17:29]>> Yes.

[00:17:30]>> So, the executive producer allowed a host to use the network's airwaves to take a not so subtle swipe at CBS News management. And you're shocked that she was fired. Cecilia Vega, Sharon Alonsi, our very best correspondents just sumearily fired for no stated reason. for no stated reason. What a convenient self-s serving narrative.

[00:17:59]Sharon Alfonsi had been publicly and loudly criticizing Barry Weiss and the new direction of CBS News for months, and Cecilia Vega was reportedly engaged in a standoff, actively resisting management directives from Weiss at every turn. You don't get fired for no reason when you make it your job to sabotage the entire leadership team. Did you talk to Anderson about why he did not renew his contract and his reasons for leaving?

[00:18:25]>> I did not.

[00:18:26]>> Wait a second. Didn't you just say that the CBS staff is a tight-knit family?

[00:18:31]>> That's a family at 60 Minutes.

[00:18:35]>> But when one of your star family members leaves the show, you didn't even bother to ask him why. Some family. If a person of Anderson Cooper's stature uh decides that he has to leave the broadcast, that's a indication um that he has found his role there untenable.

[00:18:58]>> Untenable, right? Because in Scott Py's mind, everything has to be a massive network destroying conspiracy. But the reality is we don't have to guess why Anderson Cooper left because he literally told everyone. I've got a four-year-old and a just now six-year-old and I want to spend as much time with them as I can while they still want to spend time with me. And those days, that clock is ticking, I think.

[00:19:25]So, Anderson Cooper wanted more time to spend with his kids. Wow, what a dark chilling tale of journalistic oppression. Anyway, let's get back to the aftermath of Scott Pelly's meltdown where he was reportedly called into a five-minute mandatory meeting with leadership. Surely he knew that there would be consequences. Right. Right. You then do have a meeting with CBS leadership after this very contentious um interaction. Can you tell me about that meeting and and if you were at that point going in expecting to be fired?

[00:20:04]>> Oh gosh. Furthest thing from my mind. It hadn't occurred to me.

[00:20:10]>> So Scott P hijacked the meeting, publicly mocked his new boss, called the head of CBS News a murderer, and then told them that they aren't welcome, and it hadn't occurred to him that he might be fired. The entitlement, it's just genuinely breathtaking. But it really didn't occur to you that you could be fired after so many of your colleagues had been let go after you'd had this, you know, very contentious interaction with your new boss.

[00:20:39]>> You know, some reporter I turned out to be. Uh I just didn't connect the dots.

[00:20:44]>> Finally, a a perfectly accurate and objective statement from Scott Py. What a moment of clarity. But Scott, in a meeting you accused Barry Weiss, the head of the network, of wanting to murder the show, of coming into 60 Minutes with the agenda to dismantle the institution, and you did not think that that was going to have repercussions that could lead to your firing.

[00:21:15]>> We used to be able to have conversations like that at CBS News. Um the the difference today is that the people running CBS News will not be questioned.

[00:21:28]>> Again, Scott Py didn't question them. He openly mocked and disparaged them in front of the entire staff. You can't do that at a Wendy's, let alone a major television network. Later that day, Nick Bilton sent Scott P. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparrage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. Yesterday's performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of a civil private conversation demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear and I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News Inc. to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Terminated for cause is the legal professional way of saying that Scott Ped around and found out. Wamp wamp Barry Weiss and Nick Bilton didn't murder Scott P, but they did hand him a very necessary and very expensive reality check.

[00:22:48]Well, if we want to talk about it at an emotional level, the best thing that I can imagine in terms of describing it is that it's it's like your spouse was murdered. Oh, good grief.

[00:23:01]Anyway, that's it for now. Be sure that you're subscribed to the channel and while you're at it, head over to my super cool merch store at don'twalkrun.shop. As always, thank you so much for tuning in and I hope to see you next time. If there is next time.