Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor in chief, told her newsroom on Wednesday morning that the network fired the “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley because a “foundation” of trust had been broken after he assailed CBS leadership.
“I’m only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect; we cannot do our work without it,” Ms. Weiss said on a 9 a.m. editorial call, according to a recording that was obtained by The New York Times.
“That foundation was broken on Monday,” she continued, referring to the explosive “60 Minutes” staff meeting where Mr. Pelley said that Ms. Weiss was “murdering ‘60 Minutes’” and asserted that Nick Bilton, the tech journalist hired to run the show, would “never be welcome.”
“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,” Ms. Weiss said. “We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose.”
These were Ms. Weiss’s first remarks to her staff about the decision to fire Mr. Pelley, who was informed of his dismissal on Tuesday evening. CBS News has not issued an official statement about the firing.
Mr. Pelley, in a statement on Wednesday, disputed Ms. Weiss’s account of their interaction. “There was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back,’” he said.
Mr. Pelley met on Tuesday with Ms. Weiss, Mr. Bilton and Tom Cibrowski, the CBS News president. He said that the meeting had turned hostile and that he believed the network had little interest in engaging with his concerns about the future of “60 Minutes.”
Mr. Pelley, who joined CBS in 1989, had been enraged by Ms. Weiss’s decision last week to fire the leadership team of “60 Minutes,” including its former executive producer, Tanya Simon, and two on-air correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.
At the Monday staff meeting, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley said that Ms. Weiss had been “brought in to kill” the long-running Sunday program, “and she’s been doing exactly that.” He told Mr. Bilton, who has never worked in broadcast news, that he had “slender qualifications for this job.”
Mr. Bilton took umbrage at Mr. Pelley’s remarks. In a fiery termination letter written on Tuesday, Mr. Bilton said that the correspondent had “rejected” his overtures to meet for dinner “and chose ambush instead.”
“I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama,” Mr. Bilton wrote, accusing Mr. Pelley of “antipathy” about the future of “60 Minutes.”
Ms. Weiss, an opinion journalist with little television experience, was appointed last year by David Ellison, the tech scion who purchased CBS’s parent company, Paramount. She has said she wants to modernize CBS News so that it can remain competitive in an era of digital media.
Ms. Weiss, on the Wednesday conference call, took a moment to praise Mr. Pelley’s contributions to CBS. She cited several of his recent “60 Minutes” segments, including an interview with former Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and an investigation into the mysterious ailment known as Havana syndrome.
In the season that ended in May, “60 Minutes” was among the top-rated programs on broadcast television, and its viewership was up 9 percent from the year before.
Ms. Weiss said that she wanted to move forward.
“Those are the kind of stories that have always typified ‘60 Minutes,’” she said, “and they’re the kind of stories that Nick Bilton is going to put on the air come September in Season 59 with the amazing team that’s still there.”
Three “60 Minutes” correspondents have been fired since Ms. Weiss took over CBS News last year; another, Anderson Cooper, left voluntarily. Three regular correspondents remain.
Ms. Weiss referred on the call to “some new people that are going to be joining us,” but she did not elaborate.
