CHARLES COOKE: Scott Pelley Is Ridiculous in All the Usual Ways.
Here’s Scott Pelley, formerly of CBS’s 60 Minutes, complaining about being fired for cause:
“I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast.”
Where to start? First off, if Pelley cared about his job that much, he probably shouldn’t have behaved as unprofessionally as he did when he met his new boss, Nick Bilton. As the Washington Post reports, “Pelley laid into Bilton during a Monday morning ’60 Minutes’ meeting, when he questioned Bilton’s qualifications” in front of a host of other staff. During that meeting, Pelley also insisted that Bari Weiss, his other boss, “has no qualifications for her job,” and, later, when Bilton organized a private meeting, Pelley continued in the same vein. In his letter firing Pelley, Bilton wrote that Pelley had:
rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility — enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation — demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.
Which . . . well, yeah. There is simply no circumstance in which an employee can behave like this and expect to remain employed. A lot of journalists in this country seem to believe that they belong to an elect class to which the normal rules do not apply. They do not. Journalists are protected by the First Amendment, yes, but they are not more protected than anyone else, and nor do those protections afford them the right to behave like jerks in the workplace. CBS is a private company. It is not, at root, any different than Unilever or Ford or Home Depot. Scott Pelley attacked his boss in public and private. Scott Pelley was fired. Film at 11.
“The film at 11” reference is a nice touch – Pelley, and those on the left vigorously defending him, are acting exactly like they did when they defended NPR and PBS last year when Trump cut its government funding. As Iowahawk joked:
Paddy Chafesky’s Network was a brilliant satire of how those in a network television newsroom thought and behaved in the mid-1970s, the last era of three terrestrial commercial television networks. Why do the men and women who inhabit those spaces a half century later still pretend that they have an absolute monopoly on information?
Or as John Nolte writes: Bari Weiss Accused of Killing ’60 Minutes’ After Pelley Firing (Let’s Hope So).
Normal People are surely not gullible to give 60 Minutes a second chance. We all know that the corporate media is an institution too insulated to reform because it has been infested with leftists more concerned with status than truth.
Still, we owe Scott Pelley a huge thank you for once again exposing the elite media for who they are: narcissistic prima donnas unwilling to reform, opposed to any kind of change, and laughably incapable of understanding that their sense of self-importance is a check they can’t cash.
Nolte concludes:
When’s the last time you gave any of these former media elitists a thought: Ryan Lizza, Eugene Robinson, Lester Holt, Alex Wagner, Andrea Mitchell, Jennifer Rubin, Matthew Dowd, Philip Bump, Terry Moran…?
They all vanished into the ether of Substackian irrelevance to talk to one another….
And it is glorious.
But could someone who makes Ted Baxter appear to be a well-grounded font of humility even function in Substack-land?
Scott Pelley should start a substack. Of course, since through his entire career most of the work he had done is actually done beforehand by producers and writers whose work he mouths, he may not have even the elementary skills to write one.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) June 3, 2026
