CBS NEWS HAS fired longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley after he reportedly accused the new editors of “murdering the show”.

Last year, CBS became part of Paramount Skydance and brought in Bari Weiss – a longstanding critic of progressive politics – to lead its news division.

Many CBS News journalists quit following Weiss’s appointment, alleging curbs on their editorial independence.

For example, in December, CBS News pulled a 60 Minutes segment at the last minute about the Trump administration’s deportations of Venezuelan men to a notorious detention centre in El Salvador.

Weiss had argued that the story did not sufficiently reflect the administration’s viewpoint.

The segment aired a month later, but CBS News was accused of attempting to “bury” the segment by airing it alongside an NFL playoff game.

It was reported that at a staff meeting on Monday, Pelley accused top editor Weiss of “murdering 60 Minutes”.

This was the first meeting between newly appointed 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton and the show’s staff.

“She does not love this place,” Scott said at the meeting, according to sources.

“She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

In an email to Pelley, Bilton said Pelley “hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt.”

Bilton said he “welcomes a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate” but that Pelley’s remarks were “nothing of the sort”.

#BREAK: CBS NEWS has terminated Scott Pelley's contract. pic.twitter.com/vbXyX8PBBv

— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) June 3, 2026

“Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you,” Bilton wrote in a termination letter late Tuesday.

He said Pelley’s remarks at the meeting were a “performative display of hostility”.

Bilton added that he is “here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama”.

“I therefore write on behalf of CBS News to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately,” he said.

In response, Pelley said the new CBS owner is casting aside the “legend” of the flagship news magazine programme “apparently to curry a moment of favour with the Trump administration”.

Pelley accused the new management of instructing him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story”.

“I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified,” said Pelley, who added that he “managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them”.

He also said politicians have recently been “invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast” and that the “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc”.

“The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well.”

Pelley (68) joined CBS News in 1989 and previously worked as the CBS Evening News anchor.

In July, CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show, hosted by Stephen Colbert, a staunch Trump critic.

Trump has intensified his long-established hostility toward the media since his return to the White House, regularly deriding certain outlets as “fake news.”

-With additional reporting from © AFP 2026