(CNN) — CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss said Wednesday that her leadership team had tried to reconcile with “60 Minutes” correspondent and former anchor of the “CBS Evening News” Scott Pelley, but “we weren’t able to do so.” The correspondent said that wasn’t true, reaffirming that he will not go quietly from the network where he worked for 37 years. CBS News fired Pelley on Tuesday, one day after he sharply criticized the new leadership brought in to run “60 Minutes” in front of the staff.
Pelley’s firing is sure to trigger even more scrutiny of Weiss and her controversial efforts to overhaul the network news division.
It will also force CBS into rebuilding mode since “60 Minutes” has now lost the majority of its full-time correspondents.
Last week, Weiss oversaw the firings of correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon and other senior staffers.
CBS evidently wanted Pelley to stay with “60 Minutes,” but he was incensed by the firings and by the hiring of Nick Bilton, a former tech reporter with little TV experience, to run the show in Simon’s place. At a staff meeting on Monday, Pelley confronted Bilton and accused Weiss, who was not in attendance, of “murdering” “60 Minutes.”
When Bilton said Weiss loves the show, Pelley responded, “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”
Pelley also depicted Weiss and Bilton as unqualified for their jobs and said Bilton would “never be welcome here.” His scathing remarks immediately leaked to outside news outlets and ignited a crisis inside CBS.
CBS management called Pelley in for a follow-up meeting on Tuesday afternoon. The two sides had very different depictions of the meeting afterward.
A few hours later, in a Tuesday evening letter to Pelley, Bilton wrote that Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you.”
Therefore, he wrote, “your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately.”
On Wednesday morning, Weiss told CBS staffers that “despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately, we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways.”
Pelley responded to Weiss through a statement to The New York Times. “Bari Weiss knows what she said is 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,” he said. “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.”
Pelley’s depiction of events has political overtones. President Donald Trump sued CBS in 2024 over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, and even though legal experts said the suit was frivolous, Paramount’s previous ownership team decided to settle the case in July 2025 rather than defend the program in court.
Furthermore, Paramount’s new ownership team has sought a close relationship with Trump and his administration, and some critics of CBS have asserted a link between corporate attempts to appease Trump and the current overhaul of “60 Minutes.” Paramount is currently seeking Trump administration approval to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, including CNN.
Pelley invoked some of this in an initial statement late Tuesday, saying “the new owner of our network” is casting the legacy of “60 Minutes” aside, “apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”
CBS leaders have portrayed the situation very differently, saying that Weiss and her deputies are trying to revive a moribund TV news division and reorient its programs to reach new digital audiences.
Weiss has tapped outsiders to do so. Her hiring of Bilton, a filmmaker and former New York Times tech columnist, was the latest in a string of hotly debated moves.
Some insiders at CBS said afterward that they thought Pelley was daring Weiss to fire him. His detractors at the network said he acted like a bully at the staff meeting. But his supporters — and he has many — said he was just standing up for his colleagues and trying to protect the “60 Minutes” franchise.
In the letter justifying Pelley’s termination on Tuesday night, Bilton wrote to Pelley, “You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt.”
Bilton called it a “performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff” that “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.”
“Despite yesterday’s misconduct,” Bilton continued, “I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.”
Later Tuesday evening, Bilton wrote to “60 Minutes” staffers about Pelley’s termination, acknowledging the correspondent’s stature inside the newsmagazine while defending the decision to “part ways” with him.
“I know how much Scott meant to many of you, and I don’t say this lightly,” Bilton wrote. “I made repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend, and this afternoon I tried to find common ground. That was not the path Scott chose.”
Bilton also sought to turn the staff’s attention back to the future of “60 Minutes,” writing, “I realize this is a great deal of change in a very short time, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.”
“I won’t relitigate the last week with you here,” Bilton wrote. “What I will commit to is this: My unyielding support for each of you, the journalism that you do and what we will do together going forward.”
In Pelley’s statement following the termination letter, the correspondent said “60 Minutes” “lost its DNA” due to last week’s firings.
“Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience,” Pelley wrote. “They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.”
Pelley also denounced “incompetence and unprofessionalism” from the new leaders of CBS.
“At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon,” Pelley wrote. “We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to ‘keep up the good fight.’ Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.”
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