After Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes, the longtime CBS News correspondent uttered a single sentence that captured both the greatest fears of the program’s fans and the core grievance of its detractors. Criticizing his new bosses—especially CBS editor in chief Bari Weiss—he said, “There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before.”
CBS News fans fear political bias at the organization because they believe that President Trump seeks to neuter it, and that its parent company stands to profit by appeasing him through its managers.
Critics of CBS News have long argued that its journalists inhabit a liberal bubble that blinds them to their prejudices––blindness epitomized by the claim that subtle political bias has never existed at the network, when, for decades, liberal suppositions have informed its selection and execution of stories.
Both the fans and critics have a point––and insights from both are needed if CBS News is to thrive, an outcome every American should want. 60 Minutes is often better than most of what passes for TV news, despite notable misses. Improving it is easier than creating something half as good. And it consistently reports on malfeasance in government and beyond in ways that benefit us all. But even its best reporting will fail to have an impact on Americans who don’t trust it.
The current turmoil at CBS News began in 2024, when Trump sued its parent company, Paramount, for $10 billion, alleging that CBS News edited an interview with Kamala Harris deceptively to help her in the presidential race by airing different versions of her answer on Face the Nation and 60 Minutes. The lawsuit was a preposterous attack on First Amendment press freedoms. Yet Paramount agreed to settle, paying $16 million to cover Trump’s legal fees and contribute the rest to his future presidential library––a settlement reached as it sought Trump-administration approval for an $8 billion sale to Skydance. Critics called it a bribe, and that perception was understandable. (Paramount executives and spokespeople have emphatically denied the accusation, and both Paramount and the Federal Communications Commission denied any connection between the settlement and the merger.)
Now Paramount Skydance wants to buy Warner Brothers in another multibillion-dollar deal that will require various regulatory approvals. Trump has said that he’ll involve himself in the matter. Nothing could be more logical than 60 Minutes staffers suspecting that their new corporate owners might also go to great lengths to please Trump, or to avoid upsetting him. I can’t imagine any new overseer installed from above giving 60 Minutes notes on stories related to Trump without eliciting suspicion––a judgment that holds wherever one stands on Weiss, whom I know and like, or on the debates about notes Weiss has given on 60 Minutes stories. As a rule, we should want journalists at big corporations to be on guard against political meddling, even when, as outsiders, we can’t know whether or to what degree their concerns are warranted.
Given all of that context, why is a large faction of Americans compelled by the notion that CBS News and even 60 Minutes would benefit from Weiss or other outsiders adding viewpoint diversity to its shop?
Over the weekend, Pelley gave an hour-long interview to Lulu Garcia-Navarro at The New York Times, telling his side of what happened at the show. In a short clip that circulated online, Pelley commented on a meeting in which Weiss asked senior staff, “Why does the country think you’re biased?”
Pelley said, “I wasn’t there, but that is what I’ve been told by my colleagues who were there. And they were shocked.” The reaction was “Uh-oh,” he continued, because “she didn’t offer any kind of a metric. What’s your metric? Why do you think so? Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about?” Pelley’s response was widely mocked by conservatives and independents, who perceived him to be cluelessly dismissing one of their long-standing concerns. I see why. In an era of distrust toward the media, Americans “see ‘a great deal’ (46 percent) or ‘a fair amount’ (37 percent) of political bias in news coverage.” Pew Research Center found in March 2025 (before Weiss joined) that CBS News is less trusted than ABC and NBC among both Republicans and Democrats. Ad Fontes Media, which scores the reliability and skew of media organizations, rates 60 Minutes as skewing left.
None of that proves that 60 Minutes is biased. But its journalists––like journalists at every news organization––should reflect on the various reasons why many Americans perceive bias. Asking staff to share why they think such perceptions exist is a reasonable query from any editor in chief. If this was seen as shocking, then the staff would benefit from more ideologically diverse colleagues.
As rival narratives about the turmoil at CBS News harden, the network is in more need than ever of staffers who grasp why partisans on both sides of the culture war are compelled by different understandings, and why many Americans are unsure which narrative gets closer to the truth. Among liberals, the whole of Pelley’s hour-long interview is being celebrated as a stirring defense of 60 Minutes. Its appeal is easy to understand: Pelley is an experienced journalist who has reported with bravery from war zones, not someone who sat in a studio his whole career. And he is suited for the camera: His voice, pacing, and manner project gravitas, and he shows emotion at moments that make everything he says feel credible. But anyone compelled by Pelley’s narrative of events should try to understand why it failed to compel so many others.
Because I am a cynical writer who looks extra closely at the words of anyone who seems to be good on television, Pelley’s account raised lots of red flags. Asked early in the interview how it felt to be fired from a program where he had worked for so long, Pelley said he could imagine no better way to describe it than “like your spouse was murdered.” He said he felt sorry for “these people that I left behind” at CBS News who are “still trapped there.” He called the firing of several senior staffers at the show the “Black Thursday Massacre.” He said, “When somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are hurt, and shocked, in disbelief. And just desperate for some explanation.” This is language chosen for emotional impact, not precision––it felt like he sought to manipulate my feelings, not inform me.
Pelley told The New York Times, “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.” In fact, he was covering soldiers who were in combat, a distinction worth drawing, both for accuracy and because muddying that distinction is needlessly offensive to many Americans, who predictably erupted in outrage. What’s more, neither fighting as a soldier nor covering it as a journalist renders someone correct in unrelated disputes.
Even worse, parts of Pelley’s narrative were inconsistent. Pelley said that Nick Bilton, the journalist and filmmaker recently hired by Weiss to lead the 60 Minutes newsroom, introduced himself to staff in an email, writing that “he was excited to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondents.” Pelley recounted, “When I saw that I thought, Okay, they’re gonna fire all of us, eventually. That’s the plan. He put it in writing for all of us to see.” Later, when the two met in person for the first time at a staff meeting, Pelley told Bilton that he would never be welcome at the show and that Weiss is “murdering 60 Minutes,” adding, “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it.” Asked why he felt compelled to speak up, Pelley said that he realized he was the senior person in the room. “Only I could do it,” he said. “None of them could be asked to take that risk.”
This suggests he felt speaking up was a risk. But when asked if he walked into a subsequent meeting with CBS leadership expecting to be fired, Pelley explained, “Furthest thing from my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me,” and that when he walked in and saw Weiss, he thought, “This is terrific of her. She’s come to this meeting, and now I’m going to be able to ask her these questions. She’s going to be able to explain what happened.” He joked, “Some reporter I turned out to be. I just didn’t connect the dots. Was this meeting contentious? Yes. But 60 Minutes is known for two things: a ticking stopwatch and hard questions.”
“You wanted to remain at 60 Minutes?” Garcia-Navarro asked.
“Absolutely,” Pelley replied. “It didn’t occur to me that this could happen.”
Watching the interview, Pelley seems convincing at each given moment. But try to reconcile them all. He experienced the firing of his colleagues like lots of family members being murdered … but “absolutely” wanted to go on working at 60 Minutes, for their “murderers”? He believed Weiss was hired in order to murder 60 Minutes … yet when seeing Weiss after the “massacre” she carried out, he thought, This is terrific of her. She’s come to this meeting, and assumed that their discussion would go well?
Pelley saw some colleagues fired en masse, read an email he perceived as a plan in writing to fire them all, and attacked Weiss and Bilton in a staff meeting because he felt that it would be unfair for junior colleagues to take that risk … but it never occurred to him he might be fired? The culture at 60 Minutes is supposedly such that likening your boss to a murderer and asserting she has a secret agenda to destroy the show is a standard form of debate at a place where hard questions have always been possible … but that same boss asking a question about perceptions of bias was “shocking” to everyone?
Perhaps everything that Pelley said felt true to him in an emotional moment when he was reeling from being fired, not broadcasting as a correspondent. But I find it striking that so many journalistic outlets covered the interview without noticing or mentioning its tensions and contradictions (even though Garcia-Navarro expressed skepticism in follow-up questions). Neglecting to scrutinize narratives that flatter our preconceptions is one of the behaviors that cost journalists public trust.
Among Americans, clear majorities disapprove of the job that Trump is doing and the job that the news media is doing. It shouldn’t be hard, within any large news organization, to raise the subject of bias (there are many kinds), or to suggest edits that guard against left-leaning bias, without being seen as a traitor to journalism who must be allying with Trump to destroy it.
But Trump’s efforts to exert leverage over news organizations through their corporate parents makes it harder than it would otherwise be to distinguish untoward meddling from valuable feedback. And corporate takeovers or management shake-ups always make journalists anxious, because, as at The Washington Post, they can easily end in mass layoffs and audience flight.
Then again, when your news division is trailing its competitors, in an era when there’s more competition for attention every year and the average age of your viewers is 58 years old, stasis is perilous, too. To survive and fulfill its mission, CBS News must achieve two goals that are not mutually exclusive, but that may prove out of reach: to resist political interference from the Trump administration and to convince more Americans that it is worth trusting—or at least watching and considering.
The post Why 60 Minutes Shouldn’t Ignore the Accusations of Bias appeared first on The Atlantic.
