“60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley exposed a key point of tension in the Bari Weiss era during a fiery exchange on Monday.
At a staff meeting, Pelley reportedly accused Weiss of “murdering” the iconic weekly news program.
“She does not love this place,” Pelley said, according to an audio recording obtained by Status and The New York Times. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s doing exactly that.”
Pelley made the reported remarks during an exchange with new top producer Nick Bilton. Pelley has spent more than three decades at CBS News.
Business Insider could not independently confirm the audio, and CBS News declined to comment.
Pelley’s reported comments underscore a key challenge Weiss faces as she reshapes “60 Minutes” and the broader CBS News organization: convincing skeptics that her changes are intended to modernize a century-old news operation for the streaming era, not make it more politically palatable to CEO David Ellison — and, ultimately, President Donald Trump.
Weiss has presented her broader changes as a necessary strategic realignment.
“Our strategy until now has been to cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television,” she said at a CBS News town hall earlier this year. “I’m here to tell you that if we stick to that strategy, we’re toast.”
Weiss added at that town hall that “CBS News is still in a linear mentality and we need to shift to a streaming mentality immediately.”
Navigating a transition from a linear TV world to a streaming one is hard under any circumstances.
Bilton, who Weiss installed in place of Tanya Simon, doesn’t have a TV news background. He was previously a tech journalist at The New York Times and Vanity Fair, and made documentaries for HBO and Netflix.
Pelley told Bilton that he had “slender qualifications for this job,” Status reported.
He also pressed Bilton on CBS News’ personnel changes last week, including the exits of correspondents Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi.
Vega said in an exit memo that she and her colleagues had faced “efforts to insert political bias into our stories” in the last few months.
“Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy,” Vega said. She also encouraged her now-former colleagues to “continue to hold the line.”
In Alfonsi’s memo, she recounted “an intense editorial dispute” with Weiss about her segment in December, focused on the Trump administration’s migrant deportation tactics in sending people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. Weiss delayed the story, which later ran, saying she wanted an on-the-record response from Trump officials.
After facing a wave of internal and external criticism, Weiss addressed her call to hold the story and said it wasn’t about politics.
Alfonsi told colleagues in a memo viewed by Business Insider that her ouster “was not a routine corporate transition.”
“It was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” Alfonsi wrote.
