Scott Pelley’s Embarrassing Tantrum Proves Bari Weiss’s Point

LEFT: Bari Weiss (Photo by Alberto E. Tamargo/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images) RIGHT: Scott Pelley (Photo by Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

When a child throws a tantrum, they’re punished.

When a journalist throws a tantrum, they wait to be called stunning and brave.

On Monday, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley reportedly flipped his sippy cup during a show-wide meeting, excoriating both his immediate (newly-installed executive producer Nick Bilton) and big boss (CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss).

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” raged Pelley about the latter, per The Guardian‘s Jeremy Barr. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

According to Puck’s Dylan Byers, the former suffered the insult of being lectured about his “slender qualifications,” and then the indignity of having Pelley shoot down Bilton’s suggestion that they continue the conversation privately.

Just how many Americans would keep their job after such an unprofessional outburst?

At issue is CBS’s direction since the Ellison family took the reins at the network’s parent company and tapped Weiss to lead its newsroom. The Ellisons enjoy a close relationship with President Donald Trump, and Weiss is a moderate with conventionally conservative views on some topics and conventionally liberal ones on others. Quelle horreur.

The months since Weiss took over have seen no shortage of pseudo-events breathlessly reported on by the media industry’s resident navel-gazers. There was the time she chose Tony Dokoupil, the MSNBC alum who once had the temerity to ask a tough question or two of the sainted Ta-Nehisi Coates, to helm CBS Evening News. And the time she briefly held a story from Sharyn Alfonsi — the ex-60 Minutes correspondent who once embarrassed her colleagues with a clumsy, botched hit on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) — in the hope that she might want to better it. And there was, of course, the garment-rending over the departures of beloved Democratic-operatives-in-disguise like Scott McFarlane, who fled for the bluer waters of MeidasTouch.

But while the moral panic over CBS transforming into some Newsmax-OANN Frankenstein continues apace, so too does the network’s critical coverage of the Trump and the right more generally.

In just the last eight months, 60 Minutes has seen segments about the president’s attacks on the judicial branch, the consequences of his One Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the maleffects of his sweeping imposition of tariffs, and his questionable use of the pardon power go to air. Trump was displeased enough with the tone of an April sit-down with Norah O’Donnell that he called her a “disgrace” and her colleagues “horrible people” in the middle of it.

And Weiss herself has promoted CBS reporting that would surely make Trump’s blood boil.

Conservative media watchdogs, by the way, still have no shortage of complaints about liberal bias at the network.

For Pelley and his fellow bellyachers, the problem isn’t they’ve been censored, muzzled, or otherwise prevented from reporting the truth. It’s that the culture there is shifting such that they’re no longer free to run roughshod with every partisan frame that they’d like — and that correspondents like Alfonsi are no longer guaranteed cushy titles in perpetuity.

For news consumers, that’s welcome news. For Scott Pelley, not so much.

And that’s the point, CBS exists to serve its audience, not to reward a cadre of likeminded liberal elites for their conformity.

Or at least it does now.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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