Scott Pelley Goes Scorched Earth on Bari Weiss in New Interview — Accuses Her of ‘Putting a Thumb On the Scale’ for Trump and Calls for Her Ouster

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Scott Pelley — in his first interview since being fired from 60 Minutes — is accusing CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss of “putting a thumb on the scale” for President Donald Trump’s administration and calling for her ouster.

Speaking with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of The New York Times, the fired 60 Minutes correspondent talked about the misgivings he had right from the outset of Weiss’s tenure.

“What concerned me was that she had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News,” Pelley said. “Those were red flags to me, but I thought, [Paramount Skydance CEO] David Ellison thinks she’s the right person for the job.”

Pelley went on to argue that that Weiss’s efforts to modernize the 58 year-old newsmagazine ignored what was already happening.

“Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous,” Pelley said. “It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and [new 60 Minutes executive producer] Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is.”

Pelley went on to detail his claim that Weiss was injecting “falsehoods and bias” into one of his stories. The piece centered on the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown in the city. Specifically, Pelley accused Weiss of interfering with the segment’s description of the killing of Renee Good — just hours before the show was slated to air. Here is his account:

“About four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

“This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.”

In response to this claim, a CBS News spokesperson told the Times, “In an email, Bari made four points in the course of editorial back-and-forth. They had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible. As is frequently the case in any newsroom that operates with collaboration, not everything she raised made it into the final piece.”

More broadly, Pelley claimed the incident showed Weiss is consistently doing Trump’s bidding.

“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration,” Pelley said. “Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough.”

A CBS News spokesperson responded to this claim as well, telling the Times, “There is no credible argument to suggest Ms. Weiss was ‘putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration’ in any instance over the past seven months.”

But Pelley went on to say, “The bigger problem. .. frankly, is not any kind of political influence. The problem was the incompetence. You don’t break a deadline. That episode came within 19 minutes of not making it to air. The entire hour of 60 Minutes! It was the night of the Grammys. 60 Minutes was the lead-in to the Grammys, and we almost didn’t have a broadcast. I pledged to myself that no matter what Bari Weiss wanted to do in a story, I would never break the deadline again because we put the entire network in jeopardy.”

Garcia-Navarro ultimately put the question to Pelley: “Do you think Bari Weiss needs to be removed?”

Pelley was unequivocal.

“Oh, gosh, yes,” he said. “Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, ‘There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.’ I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue. And it would have been so much better if Bari Weiss had been offered this job and said, ‘Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.'”

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