New ‘60 Minutes’ boss fires Pelley after clash

What happened

Newly installed “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton fired veteran CBS News journalist Scott Pelley late Tuesday, a day after Pelley told Bilton he had “slender qualifications” for the job and that CBS News editorial chief Bari Weiss “has no qualifications.” In his dismissal letter, Bilton accused Pelley of a “performative display of hostility” at the staff meeting and said he was “terminated for cause effective immediately.”

Who said what

“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications and my intentions,” Bilton, a former tech journalist with no TV broadcast experience, wrote to Pelley, who joined CBS in 1989. Pelley said in a statement he had resisted instructions from “new management” to “inject falsehoods and bias” into stories, but their “incompetence and unprofessionalism” had “become untenable.” With “the principles I hold dear” gone, he wrote, “I must leave as well.”

Pelley’s firing “deepened the turmoil at the nation’s most influential TV news program,” The Associated Press said. Current and former “60 Minutes” staffers “were outraged,” The Washington Post said. Without Pelley, “‘60 Minutes’ is gone,” one staffer said.

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What next?

The viewers who have kept “60 Minutes” among the “highest-rated weekly broadcasts” for decades “are accustomed to familiar faces” like Pelley’s, The New York Times said. With last week’s firing of Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega and Anderson Cooper’s departure, only four correspondents remain.