CBS Evening News Gives Scott Pelley a Better Sendoff Than He Deserved

Jorge Bonilla
June 3rd, 2026 10:18 PM

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How many people can walk into their workplace, defecate on the new management, insult their new direct supervisor, and get immediately fired for cause right before getting a glowing sendoff on the way out? Well, there’s Scott Pelley, apparently, given the sendoff he just got from the CBS Evening News. 

The Evening News ran an extended A-block in order to give Pompous Pelley a five-minute sendoff. The sendoff was bifurcated into two segments, the first being a process piece on the runup to Pelley’s firing and aftermath, which was handled by national correspondent Jim Axelrod (click “expand” to view transcript).

CBS EVENING NEWS 

6/3/26

6:40 PM

TONY DOKOUPIL: And now to this. Late yesterday, we learned that Scott Pelley, 60 Minutes correspondent and former anchor of this very broadcast, had been fired. Here is CBS News senior national correspondent Jim Axelrod.

SCOTT PELLEY [on CBS’s 60 Minutes, date N/A]: Tonight, we have the story of —

JIM AXELROD: Less than 24 hours after CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley was fired from his job on 60 Minutes, CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss addressed the decision during a staff meeting this morning: “Despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately, we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways.” Minutes later, Pelley issued a response that his discussion with CBS News executives was “hostile from the start” and that “no CBS executive at any time suggested ‘a way back.’ To say so now is disingenuous, and they know it.” CBS News executives dispute that and say the intent of the meeting was to find a path forward. 

It’s been a tumultuous three days for CBS News. On Monday, the new executive producer of 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, called the staff together to introduce himself. Soon after the meeting started, Pelley began to question him on the recent firings of former executive producer Tanya Simon, her deputy, two senior staffers, and two 60 Minutes correspondents. 60 Minutes staffers who were at the meeting say they exchanged quickly grew tense. Pelley questioned the qualifications of Bilton to lead the news magazine, saying Bilton “would never be welcome” there. And said Weiss was “murdering” the show. Last night, after the meeting with executives, Bilton sent Pelley a termination letter saying he was being fired for cause, and describing his actions in the staff meeting Monday as performative and that Pelley had no interest in contributing to the future success of the show. 

After Bilton’s termination letter, Pelley responded: “For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” although he did not identify which story. A CBS spokesman answered those charges: “There is no political interference at CBS News, not from ownership, not from Bari Weiss. The only interference is the normal back and forth between editor and correspondent that happens in every newsroom.”

PELLEY [on CBS’s 60 Minutes, date N/A]: I’m Scott Pelley.

AXELROD: And so, Pelley’s career at CBS News is now over. A career that took off in Dallas before moving to Washington to cover the Clinton administration.

PELLEY [on the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley, date N/A]: Good evening.

AXELROD: And then taking over the CBS Evening News anchor desk for six years in 2011. But it was traveling the world for 60 Minutes where Scott Pelley did much of his highest-profile work. Work that ended after 37 years at CBS News last night. Jim Axelrod, CBS News, New York.

Care is taken to report on the conflict that led to the firing, but with great deference to Pelley. Anchor Tony Dokoupil handled the second part: a gushy farewell with a “best of” reel:

CBS EVENING NEWS

6/3/26

6:43 PM

DOKOUPIL: Jim, thank you. When I started at CBS, Scott Pelley was in this very chair, still doing a dozen stories a year for 60 Minutes, and amid all of that, meeting every new correspondent to share his view of the mission here. He believed freedom of the press, to quote Madison, was “the right that guaranteed all the others.” And the stakes are always that high. And 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. And here’s just some of the work we’ll remember.

DAN RATHER [on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, September 2001]: Scott Pelley reports on search and rescue at Ground Zero.

DOKOUPIL: When the planes hit almost 25 years ago, Scott Pelley was among the first reporters down there, and he didn’t leave for days.

FDNY FIRE FIGHTER [on 09/11/01]: I’m trying to listen to see if anybody was in there.

PELLEY [on 09/11/01]: You are digging through the debris and what you are finding are the tops of fire engines?

FDNY FIRE FIGHTER [on 09/11/01]: Right.

DOKOUPIL: He covered the wars that followed in Iraq and Afghanistan, not from the studio but from the field —

PELLEY [date N/A]: How do you measure success?

DOKOUPIL: — and not once, but dozens of times.

PELLEY [date N/A]: Millions of Syrians have been forced from their home.

DOKOUPIL: He traveled to hot spots all over the world.

PELLEY [date N/A]: People living where we are now have really never known peace.

DOKOUPIL: Over his two decades at 60 Minutes that included the genocide in Darfur and the battle for Kyiv. And when the hot spot was here at home, he covered that, too, what he called the hard times generation, after the Great Recession. [TO HOMELESS TEEN, on 11/27/11] How long have you been living in this truck?

HOMELESS TEEN [on CBS’s 60 Minutes, 11/27/11]: About five months.

PELLEY  [TO HOMELESS TEEN, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, on 11/27/11] What’s that like?

HOMELESS TEEN [on CBS’s 60 Minutes, 11/27/11]: It’s an adventure.

DOKOUPIL: There were also presidential interviews, of course, from Bush to Biden. And more than 50 Emmy awards along the way. He 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. 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. Well, Scott, from all of us, thank you. 

Our own Curtis Houck often quips that CBS News ain’t NewsMax, and it shows here. This sendoff would’ve easily been shut down were the management team as MAGA-adjacent as the left and their media lapdogs want to portray them to be. 

This glowing sendoff is far better than what Pelley deserved- especially after blowing the place up, insulting his immediate chain of command, and then leaking the details of the blowup so as to cast CBS in the worst possible light en route to the dopamine crack hits provided by certain martyrdom coverage. You expect to see this type of sendoff after death, not after the tail end of a work dispute.

NBC Nightly News did their own Pelley Postmortem, focused solely on the firing and devoid of the gushy theatrics over at CBS.

NBC NIGHTLY NEWS

6/3/26

6:44 PM

TOM LLAMAS: It is one of the biggest news shows in this country, and its marquee reporter has been fired. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley is officially out at CBS News and he’s firing back tonight at the network leadership that pushed him out. Erin Mclaughlin has the latest on the turmoil from the top rated show.

SCOTT PELLEY: I’m Scott Pelley.

ERIN McLAUGHLIN: Tonight, longtime 60 Minutes veteran correspondent, Scott Pelley, is firing back after being fired by CBS. Pelley saying CBS executives are lying about why he was let go from one of the top-rated shows in America. The longtime CBS reporter had blasted the new top producer of 60 Minutes and CBS News leadership in a staff-wide meeting, saying they are “murdering” the storied newscast. Pelley then met with top executives including the network's controversial editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, who said that despite attempts to engage with him they weren’t able to find a way back, after she says he broke the newsroom's foundation of trust and respect. Pelley also accusing management of wreaking havoc on the show and instructing him to inject falsehoods and bias into politically sensitive stories, as parent company Skydance’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery awaits approval from the Trump administration. The ticking clock at 60 Minutes has been around for 58 years and near the top of the ratings,for decades.

DYLAN BYERS: What we’re really looking at is 60 Minutes’ gold standard of journalism, the most popular news program in America for over half a century, fundamentally being completely redone, rethought, restructured.

McLAUGHLIN: Bari Weiss, founder of a conservative-leaning website was brought into the network to change things up. She cleaned house at 60 Minutes, getting rid of the show's top producers. And with four full-time correspondents recently out only three remain, including the legendary Lesley Stahl, who is yet to speak publicly about the chaos at her show.

LLAMAS: All right. That was Erin McLaughlin.

The “who’s next” close serves as a sort of cliffhanger, which exposes what media covering media looks like…a giant exercise in self-important navel-gazing. As the Elitist Media continue their campaign to push Bari Weiss out of CBS, we suspect there will be much more to emerge from the Pelley firing. Unfortunately.

 

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