In his first interview after his dismissal from work 60 minutes Last week, Scott Pelley spoke candidly about the events that led to his firing and called for the firing of CBS News editor-in-chief Barry Weiss.
talking to new york times, Bailey spoke out about last week’s staff upheaval, which saw executive producer Tanya Simon and two of her top deputies sacked, with technology journalist Nick Bilton set to replace her. Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were also evicted. Bailey called these events the “Black Thursday Massacre,” noting that the final season under Simon, who has been with CBS News for 25 years, saw a ratings spike and also increased his online presence by 190 percent. He added that the dismissals came the day after he and Simon attended the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, where they won two awards.
“Within hours, all of these people were eliminated, and a third of our reporters were fired,” said Bailey, who worked at the network for 37 years. “At the same moment, we were informed of our new executive producer. His name is Nick Pelton. I’m sure he’s a great guy, but no one has ever heard of him before. He has no experience in TV news and no experience in management. So imagine how we feel when someone like that comes into a shop like 60 Minutes.”
Billy said his reaction was “shock, dismay, impossible to believe, desperately searching for an explanation, knowing the explanation would come and then not seeing it.” Share that 60 minutes It’s like family. “We travel together. We eat dinner together. We actually fight together,” he said. “My former manager and former producer, Bill Owens, saved my life in a gunfight in Iraq. So, those connections are very strong, and when someone kills and kills a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there is still none.”
Following those events, CBS officers attempted to reach out to Bailey, but he said he was “very emotionally stressed” and wanted to wait a little while so he could talk. He found out there was a staff meeting the following Monday and canceled a planned hiking trip to the Canadian Rockies with his wife. “I wasn’t going to be able to attend the meeting, and she and I talked about it, and we realized that this was an existential moment for us.” 60 minutes “I canceled vacation so I could be there,” Bailey said.
This meeting is the first time he met Hilton. Billy said the times He and the others in the audience expected Weiss to come and explain what happened, but she didn’t. “I’m waiting to see who comes in and it’s Nick Bilton and one of Barry’s deputies. No Barry. People are a little shocked by this,” he said. “While we were standing there, Nick made his way to the front of the room and did something amazing to me. He took out his phone and started reading a statement from his phone to a room full of 50 heartbroken people. With the cruelty and deafness of it, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big bunch of bread as if we were all going to feel better.”
He added that Pelton had already written an “insulting” email to staff sharing his thoughts about the news magazine, considering it “strange” that 60 minutes It only aired at 7pm on Sundays, “when we had been on air 24/7 globally, online, for over a decade. It exposed the fact that Nick Bilton knew nothing about us, knew nothing about our culture, and yet he was imposed on us as our new leader.”
At that staff meeting, Billy accused Weiss of trying to kill the program, and said Belton had “little qualifications” for the prestigious job in television news. Asked by The times Why he felt he needed to be the one speaking He said he looked around the room and realized he was the most senior person in the audience, since other senior staff had been left behind. “So when I saw Nick Bilton’s email and then saw him reading to my broken-hearted friends from his phone, I felt like someone had to stand up not just for the broadcast but for the people. There are people in that room who go to war zones when they are pregnant“Newsrooms are kind of like the military or the police or the pretty people at the FDNY down the street,” he said through tears. It is a life-threatening job in many cases. And to have people running CBS News who don’t know that, who never felt it, who don’t understand it, that’s a tragedy.
After that meeting, he was summoned to another meeting with CBS News President Tom Cebrowski. He had no idea he would be fired. When he entered the room, he said the energy was “hostile, dismissive.”
“Before I could get into my seat, Tom Cebrowski said, ‘This is an ejection offense.’ So I sat down, ‘OK, let’s talk about it,’” Bailey said. “Tom is accusing me of physically abusing Nick Belton. That’s a lie. I never got closer than 10 feet to Nick Belton. In my life, I’ve never put my hands on anyone in anger. And when he was caught in that lie, he said, ‘Okay, okay, I backed out of that.’ And I said, ‘Great.’
Billy thought their meeting would continue about the future 60 minutes, But it was over within minutes. “Cebrowski told me you’d have our answer in a few minutes,” Billy said. He returned to his office and waited four hours before deciding to leave. Shortly after, he received an email saying he had been fired.
When Billie was asked if Weiss “needs to be removed,” she replied, “Oh, gosh, yeah. Look, she’s a nice person. Her organization Free Press was very successful. But television is not her identity. This is like someone walking up to me and saying, ‘There’s a 747, with 400 people on board, and we need you to fly it to Paris.’ I would say no because I have no idea. It would have been much better if Barry Weiss had been offered this job and said: “Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that.”
Bailey said he hopes there is some kind of realization on behalf of Paramount’s leadership that “this isn’t working.”
“We have broadcasts that are almost never on the air. We respect journalists who say there is a difference between one political party and another. We have a radio program that is among the most important in America. It is the most successful in the history of television. It has done great, so why are we making these changes?” He said. “We need adult supervision, and right now we don’t have that. We have people put into these jobs who, through no fault of their own, have no TV experience. They don’t know what they’re doing. There’s an underlying political bias that I’ve never seen before in my life.” 60 minutes Before, or on CBS News before. And this is my hope: a return to reason. We can save this. “This plane may land, but right now, CBS News is on fire.”
Billy also spoke about the recent departure of Anderson Cooper and the decisions of Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim to remain at the newsmagazine.
On Cooper: Reporters don’t quit 60 minutes. It’s the greatest job in the world. There is nothing else to aspire to. So, if someone of Anderson Cooper’s stature decides he has to leave the broadcast, it’s an indication that he finds his role there untenable.
As for the remaining trio, he said he assumed they would not leave for the same reason he was not planning to leave: “We had conversations before this about staying to maintain the principles of broadcasting. If we leave, we won’t be able to help.”
