First Stephen Colbert and now Scott Pelley? Has the whole of CBS gone topsy turvy? The insufferable Pelley has been fired for cause from 60 Minutes after verbally assaulting his new boss (Executive Producer Nick Bilton) and the editor-in-chief of CBS News (Bari Weiss) at Bilton’s first staff meeting after taking over the news show. During the meeting Pelley said to Bilton, “What qualifies you to be in this position? … You have slender qualifications for this job.” He also accused Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes.
And then a day later he got the termination letter from Bilton, “Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” He described Pelley’s behavior in the meeting as a “performative display of hostility — enacted in front of the staff. … Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you.”
Pelley has been making accusations that Weiss ordered him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.” He stated that “Incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc.”
Alright, suppose Pelley was my favorite journalist. Would I then think he was right to say those things to his new boss? Of course not! Anyone who works for a large corporation knows that you don’t call out your boss and especially not at a staff meeting and you definitely don’t tell him he’s unqualified for the job. You don’t do it even if he is unqualified for the job. You can try to make your point of view known in a respectful and convincing way or you can keep quiet and send your resume out to the headhunters right after the meeting. But calling your new boss and his boss idiots or crooks is a very, very bad strategy. It will not only get you fired, it will get you black-balled in your industry. I guess Pelley thought he was bullet proof. I guess he wasn’t. Bye Scott.
So, what does all this mean? It sounds to me that Bari Weiss is making a decent attempt to turn CBS News into a news organization again instead of a propaganda machine for the Democrat party and the Left in general. I’ve got to say I’m stunned! What next? Will Donald Trump get an honest to goodness interview without the usual “Mr. President, are you still beating your wife?” question?
Well, even if nothing more gets done this is a spectacular result. Personally, I think they’ve been hoping to trigger Pelley into something like this because ending his contract will save them many millions of dollars and their bloated budgets are probably the real focus of Sky Dance and their efforts to make Paramount profitable. Well, whatever the real reason my hope is it continues and accelerates. There is no shortage of insufferable journalists at CBS and firing another dozen or two can only make life in these here United States that much better.