In the letter, Bilton writes, “I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team,” but not in the way that Pelley was doing it. “Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” writes Bilton, one might say contemptuously. Bilton calls Pelley’s criticism in the staff meeting a “performative display of hostility” and continues, “I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama.” He’s off to a less-than-stellar start, at least if his goal is not to make headlines about newsroom drama.
Pelley responded by arguing that the program “lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause.” Like others before him, he says he’s been asked to change his reporting for political reasons. “For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done,” says Pelley, according to Variety. “Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”
Pelley joined CBS in 1989 and, at one point, served as the anchor of CBS Evening News. He was one of the hosts of the broadcast, as were Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega before they were fired by Weiss last week. Bilton also replaced the previous executive producer, Tanya Simon, who in turn has been promoted to replace Bill Owens, who resigned a little over a year ago after CBS signalled it was going to settle a frivolous lawsuit from President Trump. (Part-time correspondent Anderson Cooper also called it an hour earlier this year.) At the time, Lesley Stahl—now one of just two remaining hosts on 60 Minutes—said the staff considered resigning en masse but that Owens asked them not to. It seems there’s hardly anyone left to stage that kind of protest now.
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