CBS Evening News host Tony Dokoupil paid tribute on air to Scott Pelley following his former colleague’s controversial firing from 60 Minutes.
“When I started at CBS, Scott Pelley was in this very chair, and still doing a dozen stories a year for 60 Minutes. And amid all of that, still meeting every new correspondent to share his view of the mission here,” Dokoupil, 45, told viewers in the second of two CBS Evening News segments on Pelley’s firing on Wednesday, June 3. “[Pelley] believed freedom of the press, to quote [James Madison], was ‘the right that guaranteed all the others.’ And the stakes are always that high in that, if you’d made it to CBS News, you were among the best in the world. He worked every single day to live up to that standard.”
Dokoupil looked back on Pelley’s 37 years at CBS, reminiscing about the “presidential interviews” with every leader from George W. Bush to Donald Trump and “more than 50 Emmy awards along the way.”
“[Pelley] was, in some ways, a man from another era, and that’s not a knock. He didn’t watch the competition, he said, because he knew who he was,” Dokoupil went on. “A journalist who valued truth at all costs. And always kept alive the memory of colleagues killed in the field. A reminder that his chosen line of work could be a dangerous one. But Pelley also made one major break from the past. He changed the signs around here. Under the CBS Evening News logo, where Scott Pelley’s own name would have been, he instead wrote the CBS Evening News with All of Us.”
Dokoupil closed the segment by saying, “Well, Scott, from all of us, thank you.”
The glowing tribute to Pelley, 68 — who anchored the CBS Evening News from 2011 to 2017 — was in sharp contrast to other statements from CBS News in the wake of Pelley’s firing earlier this week.
A tumultuous week at CBS News kicked off at a 60 Minutes staff meeting where new executive producer Nick Bilton introduced himself to his team on Monday, June 1. Per multiple reports, Pelley took issue with Bilton’s qualifications during the meeting and accused CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes by inserting political bias.
A leaked memo from Bilton, 49, announced that Pelley was fired the following day. In that memo, Bilton wrote to Pelley that his “antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear.”
“I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately,” Bilton confirmed.
Following his firing, Pelley broke his silence by accusing the management of CBS of casting aside the news division’s legacy “to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.” (Skydance Media, led by Trump ally David Ellison, the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, purchased CBS parent company Paramount last year.)
“For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified,” Pelley claimed. “To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”
He went on, “At 60 Minutes, we have fought harder than anyone knows to save the program that became an American icon. We owed that to our millions of viewers. I am deeply moved by the thousands of wishes we have received to ‘keep up the good fight,’” Pelley wrote. “Most of the men and women of CBS News are still in that fight. But now the collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable. The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.”
CBS News denied that journalists faced political pressure over critical stories of the Trump administration.
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