Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at ‘60 Minutes’

So, you walk in and what was the energy of the room? Hostile, dismissive. Before I can take my seat, Tom Cibrowski said, this is a firing offense. So I sit down, like, OK, let’s talk about it. Tom accuses me of physically abusing Nick Bilton. This is a lie. I didn’t come within 10 feet of Nick Bilton. In my life, I have never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, well, OK, I take that back. And I said, great.

So I’m thinking that the meeting’s going to carry on. We’re going to have a long conversation. Very quickly after the meeting began, Tom Cibrowski said, this conversation is over. I was stunned. I didn’t have a 60-minute stopwatch in that room. I don’t know how long it lasted really, but I think it was about 10 minutes. Cibrowski tells me, you’ll have our answer in a few minutes. I went over to my office, and much to my surprise, all of my guys on my team were still there. They wanted to know what happened in the meeting. What was that all about? Did they explain why our people were fired? And I sat down in my office, it has a big plate glass window that looks out on the newsroom, and there were a whole bunch of people standing out there. I didn’t think anything of it. I’m waiting to find out what my fate is. I explained to my team, “I think I just got fired, but they haven’t told me that.” And then I look up and all those people are still out there, and then it hits me. This is a vigil. Four hours go by, and I go outside and said, “I’m leaving.” I packed up and left just so those people would go home. And not long after that, the email came through and said that I’d been fired.

I want to take a step back because this didn’t happen in a vacuum. The saga at CBS News began when David Ellison, the son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS as part of his purchase of Paramount. There was a lot of turmoil around that sale. The longtime previous owner of Paramount and CBS, Shari Redstone, told my New York Times colleague that she sold the company to Ellison in part because, after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, she wanted to devote herself to causes around Israel. I’m sure there were other reasons as well. Did you ever speak to Ms. Redstone about the sale, and how did you feel about it? I didn’t speak to Shari Redstone about the sale. I felt the sale was very necessary. The company was in financial trouble. It wasn’t clear what our path forward was going to be. Mr. Ellison came in with a lot of money, a young man of vision, and I thought this was going to be very good for all of us.

The very last thing that the previous ownership did was pay a multi-million-dollar bribe to the president to settle this frivolous, ridiculous lawsuit. And very shortly after that, somehow the Trump administration approved the sale. That lawsuit against “60 Minutes” had caused a great deal of concern. Paying the bribe broke our hearts. No lawyer thought that was necessary, but they did it to get the sale through. [At the time, Paramount denied any link between the settlement payment and the deal being approved.] At that point, my colleagues and I thought, great, that’s behind us. We have bright new leadership with financial resources. We’re in better shape than we were before. That was the theory.

Ellison then hires Bari Weiss to run CBS News. Weiss is a former opinion writer at The New York Times who left to start her own publication after claiming bias in the Times Opinion section. I never worked with her, for the record. The Free Press, which she launched, is generally pro-Israel and bills itself as pushing against what it sees as the mainstream media. What did you make of her appointment? I was not familiar with her name, so I did some research and discovered those things that you just outlined. What concerned me was that she had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News. Those were red flags to me, but I thought, David Ellison thinks she’s the right person for the job. We are absolutely going to welcome her, listen to her, and give her the benefit of the doubt.