Hours after CBS fired longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, following a tense and widely reported clash with the show’s newly installed executive producer Nick Bilton one day prior, I found myself thinking back to a phone conversation I once had with Pelley as he was on his way to JFK Airport to fly out for a story.
He was headed to Europe, and we eventually got around to talking about the show itself. When I asked at one point why 60 Minutes still matters today, Pelley didn’t hesitate: In an age of fragmented information, misinformation, and evaporating trust from viewers, he insisted that the program’s mission had never been more important. The show “must exist today,” he told me, “because the quality of information has become so poor. People are getting information in tiny fragments. People are getting disinformation fed to them from all corners.
“And 60 Minutes is a place where you can go still today, thank god, where you can see a story that is well-researched, well-edited … So I think 60 Minutes’ reason to be has never been greater in its entire history.”
A tumultuous week for ‘60 Minutes’
His remarks to me then obviously stand in contrast to his assertion to Bilton earlier this week that CBS News boss Bari Weiss is “murdering” 60 Minutes at the behest of the Trump administration — and also under the auspices of David Ellison, the Trump-aligned CEO of Paramount, which owns CBS News.
Pelley’s abrupt firing, one of the biggest stories in media right now, comes amid a sweeping overhaul of CBS News that’s already seen a wave of departures, layoffs, and resignations. 60 Minutes itself has also lost executive producer Tanya Simon, executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, while Anderson Cooper departed the program earlier this year.
And while Pelley was unavailable for comment, he did release a statement after his firing that blasted the current leadership of CBS News for “incompetence and unprofessionalism” and for working “to curry favor with the Trump administration.”
Setting aside the fact that Bilton now has quite a task before him — with less than four months or so before an expected launch of 60 Minutes’ new season in September, along with multiple editor and correspondent roles to fill — one of the many noteworthy things that stands out about the show and internal drama is the messaging around it.
Pelley’s comments to me about 60 Minutes’ relevance, for example, track the show’s own marketing verbiage, with its social media channels touting that 60 Minutes ended its 58th season in May “breaking records.” It remains, among other things, the #1 news program in the U.S. for the 52nd consecutive year, with 2.5 billion video views across social media — a 185% increase from the prior season, according to the show.
60 Minutes also averaged 9.1 million TV viewers last season, up 9%. The program, in other words, certainly looks like it’s found a formula that works.
That said, notwithstanding those metrics or the sense of urgency and mission articulated by a correspondent like Pelley — who worked for CBS News for nearly 37 years, and for more than 20 of those years at 60 Minutes — the show’s current management sees a TV property that’s actually sliding inexorably toward irrelevance.
“Broadcast,” Bilton reportedly noted during this week’s contentious meeting with staff, “is an iceberg that’s melting.” And in a welcome note to the show’s employees, he elaborated about how “the world we are reporting on, and the world we are reporting to, where people consume their news, has moved. And if we don’t move with it, in the ways that matter, we won’t be here for the next sixty years.”
Speaking at an all-hands town hall to CBS News employees earlier this year, Weiss reportedly stressed that dramatic change was needed across the board at the network’s news division. Because “we are not producing a product enough people want.”
In other words: It can feel at times, certainly to anyone on the outside, like the key people involved with 60 Minutes are all talking about a different TV show whenever they communicate about the program. It’s either as relevant as ever, a record-breaking success, or doomed for irrelevance and sorely in need of change, depending on who you ask.
As for the staffers who remain, NBC News reported Wednesday that many feel “completely adrift” and a sense of “great uncertainty.”
