Scott Pelley, the famed CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent who was fired last week by Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, gave an interview to the New York Times about what occurred. I reproduce it below because it’s an important indictment of Bari Weiss, of Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News, and of David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance, the parent corporation of CBS. It shows very clearly that, in effect, Trump fired Pelley because Trump doesn’t want Americans to get the truth about what he’s doing — just as Trump fired Stephen Colbert from the same network because Colbert was telling Americans the truth about Trump, through satire. The question I want to leave you with (and will take up in a later post) is: what are we going to do about this?

Here are Pelley’s words:

“No one saw the Black Thursday massacre coming. This is our entire senior staff. Tanya Simon, our boss, she’s the first woman ever to be executive producer of “60 Minutes.” And she concluded this season with a growth in our audience of nine percent, which is unheard-of in broadcast television, and a growth of our online presence of 190 percent. Last season, we had 2.5 billion views. That’s a third of humanity! So we’re riding high.

The night before, Tanya and I were at the Emmy Awards, and we won two Emmys. Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired. At the same moment, we are informed of our new executive producer. His name is Nick Bilton. I’m sure he must be a wonderful man, but no one had ever heard of him. He has zero experience in television news and no experience in management. So imagine how we feel when someone like that comes into a shop like “60 Minutes.”

Explain to me exactly how you felt....
Shock, dismay, impossible to believe, searching desperately for an explanation, knowing that an explanation would be forthcoming and then not seeing that. No executive at CBS News, our editor in chief, Bari Weiss, coming over to explain, to talk with us, to sit with us. That’s a family at “60 Minutes.” My colleagues and I have worked together 10, 20, 30 years. We travel together. We dine together. We go into literal combat together. My former boss and former producer Bill Owens saved my life in a firefight in Iraq. So, these bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.

CBS leadership says that they tried to get in touch with you to talk about all of those changes before Bilton’s first day and you didn’t speak to them. Why not?
I’m almost 69 years old, and if I’ve learned one thing in life, it is not to reflexively react when you feel that way. I thought, I’m going to give it a day. I’m too emotionally wrought up. I am going to say the wrong thing. I am not going to hear what they have to say. This isn’t the moment. So we got through the weekend, and I learned that Nick Bilton was going to speak to the “60 Minutes” staff that next Monday morning. My wife and I had a hiking trip in the Canadian Rockies planned, and I wasn’t going to be able to be at the meeting and she and I talked about it, realized that this was an existential moment for “60 Minutes” and canceled the vacation so I could be there. That was the first time that I had an opportunity to meet Nick Bilton.

At that meeting, you spoke up very forcefully. You asked him why he’d taken the job “knowing that you will never be welcome here.” Why did you decide to have that first interaction with your new boss in public and not behind closed doors?
It was behind closed doors. I was with my family in a closed room. None of this was meant to be public. Imagine I’m walking into this room with these people who have devoted their lives to “60 Minutes.” They have not received any kind of explanation. They are waiting for Bari Weiss to walk in the room in the hope that she’s going to explain why this tragedy has occurred and why it was so necessary. I’m waiting to see who comes in and it’s Nick Bilton and one of Bari’s deputies. No Bari. People are a little shocked by this. As we’re standing in there, Nick makes his way to the front of the room and does something absolutely jaw-dropping to me. He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people. The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. They put out a big spread of bagels like we were all going to feel better....