MS NOW host Rachel Maddow suggested former “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley join her network after he was fired from CBS News on Tuesday.
“There’s nobody who is more acutely attuned to the value of a free press than those who are trying to take it away,” Maddow said on an MS NOW panel.
“And when the president baldly says, ‘I am going to use the power of the state in order to get the media that I want,’ and he lines up oligarchic friends in order to do that for him. Again, there’s no pretense. There’s no saying this is for any other reason.”
She added, “There’s nothing else going on at CBS News other than what we can see is happening at CBS News. And I don’t know where Scott Pelley will land. Frankly, I hope he lands right here.”
Fellow MS NOW host Michael Steele could be heard replying “yeah” to the remark as Maddow continued.
“I hope he’s on TV tomorrow. And I hope that everybody in journalism and everybody who values a free press figures out ways to outmaneuver the people who are trying to take the free press from us,” Maddow said.
“But it is a fully joined fight at this point. And there’s no, I just don’t think there’s any pretense that anything else was happening here.”
During the night, Maddow repeatedly referred to Pelley’s firing from “60 Minutes” as an “oligarchic” takeover of the press by the Trump administration.
“I made a crack there talking about the Scott Pelley news as being sort of Hungarian oligarchic style take over the media. And I mean that sort of as a joke, but also sort of deadly serious,” Maddow said.
Pelley was fired from the long-running CBS News show on Tuesday following a bitter clash with the network’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and new “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton.
Fox News Digital confirmed that Pelley’s exit came after he lashed out at Bilton during an all-staff meeting Monday where he accused Weiss of “murdering” the storied news magazine program and bluntly told Bilton, who has no linear television experience, that he has “slender qualifications” for his new role.
In his own statement, Pelley slammed parent company Paramount CEO David Ellison for tarnishing CBS News’ reputation “to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”
“The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well,” Pelley wrote.
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