Scott Pelley Is Big Mad About "60 Minutes"
He is somewhere right now chewing the hell out of his innocent glasses
My latest at Daily Wire:
Somewhere today in America, erstwhile CBS anchorman Scott Pelley is chewing the living hell out of the arm of his glasses in a bout of uncontained fury at the way his bosses are fixing 60 Minutes.
Pelley, infamously the most anti-Trump anchor in television history (quite the accomplishment, considering George Stephanopoulos exists), went on a loud, unprofessional rant during a meeting. This memorable moment, sure to be enshrined with a shiny plaque, was reported with glee by reporters at The New York Times, The Guardian, and Puck – who had to work hard to get audio Pelley clearly wanted leaked. Pelley’s spittle-flecked invective against CBS boss Bari Weiss and new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton included referring to a list of recent firings as “Black Thursday,” as if letting go a list of hacks on a show that survives only based on the fact that it follows the National Football League was a date to be noted in the annals of history.
“She’s murdering 60 Minutes! … She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that,” Pelley reportedly said, telling his new boss he “would never be welcomed” at the show. “[Weiss] has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
As a former CBS employee for several years, Pelley was infamous for asking the stupidest questions in production meetings, and now he clearly wants the award for “big loud speech that establishes exactly why you’re not a newsman and hopefully gets you a severance package that can help stand up your new Substack.”
What inquiring minds want to know is: Did Pelley walk in already twirling his glasses, or did he wait til he got rolling?
Here’s the real thing that bothers Scott Pelley: the era of the pompous Democrat television anchor is over. That role is filled by John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel, and was formerly filled in his own house by Stephen Colbert. People don’t want a newsreader who lectures them simply by virtue of their ability to read a prompter. And they certainly don’t want that type of lecture from people who clearly hate half the country they’re reporting on every night.
I don’t know if what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS is going to work. Television is hard – I’ve been in it just as a commentator and contributor for a decade and a half, and I’m still learning. But CBS is a network institution with a wealth of internal value if it can be brought out of the dusty corners of decrepit leftism into the present day, and not just because of Jane Pauley’s CBS Sunday Morning segments on the history of the Erie Canal. The people that won’t be part of it are the Scott Pelleys of the world – people who don’t report, research, or find the news for themselves, but read it on a camera and feel like that gives them oracular authority over the direction of the world behind the little red light.
Chew on that, Scott.
