“60 Minutes,” a crown jewel of broadcast journalism, is known for breaking big stories. This week, it has found itself at the center of one.
Scott Pelley, a longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent and a former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” was fired on Tuesday after a contentious staff meeting where he admonished management and criticized the long-running show’s new direction.
It was the latest in a string of staffing changes and controversies since the network’s parent company was acquired last year and Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion staffer and longtime critic of legacy media, was hired to lead the news division.
Here’s how CBS and “60 Minutes” ended up here.
August 2025: CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is acquired
The shake-ups at CBS News began last year, when the media company Skydance took over Paramount. The $8 billion deal placed Skydance’s founder, David Ellison, at the helm of a powerful media conglomerate.
Mr. Ellison pledged to overhaul Paramount. But he was inheriting steep financial challenges and morale issues: A month before the acquisition, Paramount agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview. The settlement was viewed by many in the CBS newsroom as a low point for the storied television network.
October 2025: Mr. Ellison appoints Ms. Weiss to lead CBS News
In October, Paramount bought the digital news start-up The Free Press and appointed its founder, Ms. Weiss, editor in chief of CBS News. She was given a mandate to revamp the news division for the digital era.
Ms. Weiss’s first few months on the job were met with skepticism from staff. She bluntly asked “60 Minutes” journalists why the country believed they were biased, hired new on-air contributors and personally booked some guests for interviews, a departure from the industry norm.
In December, Ms. Weiss abruptly postponed a segment about Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a “brutal” prison in El Salvador, saying it needed more reporting. Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment, called the move “political.” (The segment later aired in full, with additional comments from the Trump administration.)
At her first network-wide meeting in January, Ms. Weiss addressed the bumps of her early tenure and framed the future of CBS News in stark terms, warning employees that it would be “one hell of a fight” to keep pace in a rapidly changing business.
“We are not producing a product enough people want,” she said, while dismissing day-to-day Nielsen ratings as an outmoded benchmark. “What winning looks like writ large for this company is building incredible journalism for audiences that are so much bigger than the one that we currently have,” she added.
May 2026: Ms. Weiss names Nick Bilton to lead “60 Minutes” as part of staff overhaul
Last Thursday, Ms. Weiss named Mr. Bilton, a former technology columnist for The Times and a filmmaker who has directed and produced documentaries for HBO and Netflix, as her pick to replace Tanya Simon as the show’s executive producer.
Mr. Bilton has never worked in traditional broadcast news, and his varied career was among the reasons Ms. Weiss was drawn to him, she said. But some “60 Minutes” staffers viewed Mr. Bilton’s hiring as a signal that the show would drastically change.
Mr. Bilton’s appointment came amid other personnel changes at the news magazine. Ms. Alfonsi last month said the network declined to renew her “60 Minutes” contract. Days later, she and Cecilia Vega, the program’s first Latina correspondent, were fired.
Ms. Simon, the show’s executive producer who had been at “60 Minutes” for more than three decades, and Draggan Mihailovich, the show’s executive editor, were also fired, as was Matthew Polevoy, a senior producer.
Anderson Cooper voluntarily left the show after nearly 20 years as a correspondent at the end of the season in May.
June 2026: Mr. Pelley clashes with CBS management
At an explosive staff meeting on Monday, Mr. Pelley told Mr. Bilton that he had “slender qualifications for this job” and accused Ms. Weiss of “murdering ‘60 Minutes.’”
At the meeting, which Ms. Weiss did not attend, Mr. Pelley said that the editor in chief had been “brought in to kill” the program, and that “she’s been doing exactly that.”
The next day, CBS News fired Mr. Pelley. In a letter to Mr. Pelley, which was obtained by The Times, Mr. Bilton expressed his frustration with the correspondent’s remarks. “You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” he wrote.
Mr. Pelley met earlier on Tuesday with Ms. Weiss, Mr. Bilton, and Tom Cibrowski, the CBS News president. Mr. Pelley said afterward that the meeting turned hostile and that CBS News didn’t respond to questions about why senior employees were fired. Ms. Weiss told her newsroom on Wednesday that management sought reconciliation but was unable to “find a way back” with Mr. Pelley.
“We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose,” she said.
Mr. Pelley assailed the new leadership of CBS News in a statement to The Times, writing that “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc at the network.” He also wrote that senior managers at CBS News had pressured him to insert bias into “60 Minutes” stories this past season, though he did not provide details about specific segments.
Ms. Weiss said during the Wednesday newsroom meeting that the network fired Mr. Pelley because a “foundation” of trust had been broken.
“I’m only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect,” she said. “We cannot do our work without it.”
Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting.
Sophia June is a news assistant for the Business section of The Times.
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