Nick Bilton, a 49-year-old tech journalist who was named the new boss of ‘60 Minutes’ in a major reshuffle, wrote a scathing letter to correspondent Scott Pelley as CBS News fired him, saying Pelley’s “antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you.”
Therefore, he wrote, “your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately.”
What Nick Bilton told Scott Pelley
The letter referenced Pelley’s decision to question and criticize Bilton in a staff-wide meeting on Monday morning, June 1. Pelley’s scathing comments leaked to news outlets outside, triggering a crisis inside CBS, CNN reported.
Justifying Pelley’s termination, Bilton wrote to Pelley, “You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt.”
Bilton went on to call it a “performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff” that “demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress.”
“Despite yesterday’s misconduct,” Bilton continued, “I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.”
On Tuesday evening, Bilton wrote to ‘60 Minutes’ staffers about Pelley’s exit, “I know how much Scott meant to many of you, and I don’t say this lightly. I made repeated attempts to have direct conversations with him over the weekend, and this afternoon I tried to find common ground. That was not the path Scott chose.”
Read More | Scott Pelley fired: CBS terminates 60 Minutes correspondent after clash with management – 5 things to know
Bilton then tried to turn the staff’s attention back to 60 Minutes’ future, saying, “I realize this is a great deal of change in a very short time, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.”
“I won’t relitigate the last week with you here,” Bilton wrote. “What I will commit to is this: My unyielding support for each of you, the journalism that you do and what we will do together going forward.”
What did Scott Pelley do before being fired?
In a meeting on Monday, Pelley accused editor in chief Bari Weiss of trying to “kill” the newsmagazine and objected to her hiring of Bilton, a former tech reporter with little TV news experience, to run the program. He had reportedly refused to meet with Bilton and Weiss privately to discuss last Thursday’s shake-up at ‘60 Minutes,’ which included the firings of top producers and two correspondents. On the same day, Bilton was appointed.
Pelley at Monday’s staff meeting depicted Weiss and Bilton as unqualified for their jobs. He even said that Bilton would “never be welcome here,” per CNN.
Read More | Scott Pelley blasts new CBS management in lengthy exit note, ‘Instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias…’
“She has no qualifications for her job,” Pelley said of Weiss, according to the source, the New York Post reported. “The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
The meeting ended without any clear resolution about the way forward. Sources told the New York Post that Bilton abruptly ended the meeting after a heated exchange with Pelley.
Pelley said in a statement after being fired that ‘60 Minutes’ “lost its DNA” due to last week’s firings.
“Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience,” Pelley wrote. “They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.”
