In a Flash, 60 Minutes Forgot 60 Years of Success

Letter to Romans: CBS’s “60 Minutes” was the gold standard in journalism since 1968 by wearing unbiased reporting on its sleeve. It’s 2026 “anchor” rejected those roots in the new reform-minded boss’s staff meeting, then, cried on her bared shoulder …

… Scott Pelley’s tantrum went on for days. Yet, even after being mercifully fired (he never resigned on his “principles”) the ongoing if one-way spat continued in a “weepy” interview with the New York Times. In that very public forum, he again suggested CBS’s News’ new editor-in-chief Bari Weiss & exec producer Nick Bilton were “incompetent” and had waged a kind of jihad “massacre” of his colleagues and their journalistic integrity. What apparently had galled Pelley was something about a Trump lawsuit, firing a great colleague and ya da ya da. As the WSJ’s Holman Jenkins noted, Pelley unwisely kept up justifying his earlier “demeaning, insulting” criticism of his new boss(es) by saying he thought her staff meeting was really a “family” affair in which no holds were barred. Opined Jenkins: Pelley continued his brass knuckles criticism without simply “apologizing when the only right thing to do was apologize.” Ironically, Jenkins noted, “Scott Pelley wanted to stay; the network wanted him to stay. The rest was snafu.”

What the columnist was simply saying is the long-time CBS anchor let hubris get the better of him. That Pelley’s crying on his boss’s shoulder, as well as everyone who’d care to listen, was really about the network trying to redirect a woke staff back onto its unbiased historical track. Pelley wanted all to stay on Pelley’s track. It was a lost cause so long as he knew better than the boss.

Davd Soul