"It's working for me."

Some additional thoughts on CBS's firing of Scott Pelley

As the morning dawned the day after last night’s breaking news that Nick Bilton, the new Executive Producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” had fired Scott Pelley from his correspondent’s job on the TV newsmagazine, we realized there was far more to examine about the whole 36-hour episode. Perhaps even a few management lessons to point out by “returning to the scene of the crash.”

Put more succinctly by the closing question of the late Jerry Springer: “So what have we learned here today?”

Let’s start with the obvious platitudes: No one player is bigger than the entire team. If you never want to know what it is like to be fired, then be your own boss. And if you’re going to stand up for what you believe in, prepare to pay a price for your convictions.

All of these quotes could apply to the situation that unfolded at “60 Minutes.” The chain reaction began days before the Monday morning confrontation that featured Scott Pelley challenging his new boss’s attempt to channel his inner Kevin Bacon-as-ROTC-crowd controller from the movie “Animal House” and assure the “60 Minutes” team that he was hired to lead to, in essence, “Remain Calm, All is Well.”

For his part, Pelley decided to go all “Eric Stratton” (As played by Tim Matheson in the same movie) before the Faber College Pan-Hellenic council and deliver a dramatic defense of the program he’s worked on for the past 24 years. Lines were drawn, positions were taken. No one was backing down.

To carry our absurdist movie analogy a little further, CBS News Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss dutifully played the role of Dean Vernon Wormer of Faber College, and skipped past putting Pelley on the equivalent of “Double secret probation” and proceeded directly to having Bilton parroting the Dean’s speech of “You’re Out! Finished at Faber! I want you off this campus by Monday Morning!”

Bilton delivered the message via a termination letter, seemingly intended for a much larger audience than just Mr. Pelley and, probably, his lawyer(s). Even Megyn Kelly noted in a post on X that Bilton sounded “needy” in his lengthy explanation of why Pelley was being let go. She notes that simply saying: “Dear Mr. Pelley: You’re fired, effective immediately” would have been far more impactful.

She makes a good point.

All written correspondence about any termination, whether to the employee being dismissed or to the remaining staff, should typically be done with as few words as possible. That’s management 101 kind of stuff. It may seem a tad cold to do so, but any HR professional would tell you it's the best way to go.

Bilton makes a point of telling Pelley that he is being terminated “for cause.” Not being privy to all the conversations that may have happened behind the scenes (though it sure sounds like most of them have been made public by one or both sides in the matter), we have to wonder aloud exactly what would support that justification.

No matter how insubordinate or “rude” Mr. Pelley’s comments were in the Monday morning staff meeting with Bilton, such speech would be difficult to categorize as making it impossible for anyone to do their job. Heated discussions take place in newsrooms on a pretty regular basis, and by all accounts over the years, the offices of “60 Minutes” have been no exception.

For his part, Bilton is reported to have said during the Monday morning confrontation: “I have no problem taking a job in a place that I am not welcome in.” And he told Pelley directly in front of those witnessing the face-off between the two: “You are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people. I want that to be clear.”

Sorry Nick, but your actions indicate the opposite.

Yes, we’ve read that Pelley refused to meet privately with Bilton and/or Bari Weiss before the Monday morning session. However, Pelley did not ignore the invitation to a meeting late Tuesday afternoon with the two and other CBS management. Whether whatever was said in that gathering led to Pelley’s defenestration, we don’t know. Oliver Darcy of Status.news reported that meeting, which “lasted less than 30 minutes,” was “contentious.”

Darcy notes in his story, “A person close to CBS News leadership told Status that there had been a genuine effort to find a way for Pelley to remain on the show, but that management believed Pelley was not interested in working with them on that front. To be fair, he had effectively dared them to fire him.”

This leads us to wonder if this was perhaps Pelley’s goal all along. One clue was when, in the heat of the Monday confrontation, another CBS News executive tried to intercede on Bilton’s behalf, saying: “This is not actually productive. This is not an interview.”

Pelley’s immediate response: “It’s working for me.”

Scott Pelley definitely had a contract with the network that reportedly paid him millions of dollars a year. The statement he publicly released following his termination (A copy of which was published online by Status) includes the specific claim that “new management has specifically instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” That sure sounds like Pelley was already unhappy with the program's direction before Bilton’s arrival on Monday morning, bearing free bagels.

What better way to be fired from a contract you might want to get out of, while exiting in a proverbial “blaze of glory,” that serves as both standing up for his colleagues in particular — and journalistic ethics in general. That sure sounds reminiscent of Eric Stratton’s declaration of “You can do what you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!”

As we initially noted, the biggest questions remaining post-Pelley’s departure from the program concern who else on the “60 Minutes” staff might decide to follow him out the door. Correspondents Bill Whitaker and Lesley Stahl haven’t said what their future with the program will be, and Jon Wertheim certainly wouldn’t relish the idea of being “the last man standing” when everything is said and done.

Should he desire to, Pelley can likely land somewhere new before the end of the week. Any number of outlets would happily fund the kind of long-form storytelling he built his reputation on, and it’s difficult to imagine CBS wanting the additional PR headache of enforcing a non-compete on top of everything else already in the public record.

At the very least, he could start a Substack. Plenty of recently displaced journalists have ended up there.

We’re told it’s not bad work.

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