By
Charlotte Klein,
a features writer and media columnist at New York Magazine
In his termination letter to longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, the show’s brand-new executive producer, Nick Bilton, complained that Pelley had decided to “ambush” him with “a performative display of hostility” during a Monday meeting with the show’s staff. There was certainly an element of the theatrical, possibly even the premeditated, in Pelley’s confrontation with his new boss, with Pelley delivering the kinds of withering lines (“You have slender qualifications for this job”) that aggrieved employees can only dream of — all of which were instantly leaked to sympathetic reporters and spread far and wide. Pelley clearly wanted a fight.
The question then became how Bilton and the person who hired him, Bari Weiss, would respond to this massive display of disrespect. They chose not only to fire Pelley, but to blame the entire dispute on him. Bilton’s letter accused Pelley, a 30-year veteran at CBS, of having “no interest in contributing to the future success of the show.” Pelley fired back that Weiss and her team, among other offenses, “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”
