As the fallout continues over Scott Pelley‘s firing from 60 Minutes and CBS News, his former colleague at the newsmagazine, Steve Kroft, spoke his mind about the turmoil at the show and the division.
“This is journalistic interference,” he told Geoff Bennett during an interview Wednesday on PBS NewsHour. “It makes no business sense whatsoever. It’s the highest-rated news program on television, and it has been that way for more than 50 years.” Watch the interview below.
Kroft, who spent nearly two decades at 60 Minutes starting in 1990, teed off on the firings of Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega under newly minted CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. “I think it’s been disastrous — for the show, for the audience, which is not insubstantial,” he told Bennett. “It’s been going on a long time.” He then referenced the show’s 2024 interview with Kamala Harris that led to Donald Trump suing CBS — and a controversial multimillion-dollar settlement by parent company Paramount Skydance, which is seeking administration approval of its proposed Warner Bros Discovery merger.
Kroft also blasted that Paramount over its motives for the settlement. “Paramount has just decided that .. was the only thing that’s important, and they were going to try and block anything that might get in the way of that.”
He added: “[It’s] been said by the president and his staff and by the chairman of the FCC [Brendan Carr] that they don’t like the way CBS has been operated. They don’t like the fact that it’s on the air. They would like to see it taken off the air. They’ve said that a number of times. They’d like to see people fired, and that’s what’s happened.”
Pelley was fired for cause Tuesday, one days after a verbal confrontation with the show’s new executive producer Nick Bilton in which the veteran correspondent blasted the news division leadership.
The firing of "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley marks the latest and most dramatic chapter in the upheaval surrounding the storied newsmagazine and CBS News, as Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss moves to reshape both the program and the news division more broadly.
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