By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2026-06-11 00:24:22 | Updated at 2026-06-14 08:20:04
3 days ago
Stephen Colbert walked so Scott Pelley could run — or, more accurately, get himself flung right out of CBS.
Yes, it's been a spectacular time for puffed-up men of a certain vintage, so smug and sanctimonious in their moral and professional rectitude.
And so, we bid adieu to Pelley, a 68-year-old grizzled news veteran (so he says, in more ways than one), who nonetheless found himself shocked, shocked, to be fired after openly insulting his employers.
Pelley's admitted question to his new boss at 60 Minutes, Nick Bilton, last week: Why did Bilton take the job, Pelley asked, 'knowing that you will never be welcome here?'
Professional! Mature! Not at all humiliating for Bilton to be so confronted in a closed-door meeting with fifty CBS staff members!
But Pelley was so stunned to be cut loose — clearly thinking he was irreplaceable — that he ran over to the New York Times to tell his tale of woe.
Oh, and in that same meeting, Pelley — doubtless in his insufferable news-anchor-baritone-coming-from-the-diaphragm — declared that CBS News chief Bari Weiss is 'murdering 60 Minutes'.
What kind of seasoned, investigative journalist wouldn't realize that this kind of public insubordination will only result in termination?
Stephen Colbert walked so Scott Pelley could run - or, more accurately, get himself flung right out of CBS.
Unless, perhaps, Pelley was engaging in a kind of professional suicide-by-cop: By forcing CBS to fire him, rather than resign, he can depict himself as a martyr.
Now: Is it painful to be canned from a network you've called home for the past 37 years? Of course.
Would anyone think to compare this loss to, say, one's spouse being murdered?
Pelley, to the Times: 'It's like your spouse being murdered.'
Is it? Is it, really? Mainstream liberal media wonders why it's dying —and self-important, so-called journalists such as Pelley are a central reason why.
One of the first rules of journalism is that the story isn't about you. It's never about you. Your job, if you're doing it right, is to get out of the way.
But here's Pelley, during his lengthy, self-pitying lament, trying to convince us all that he doesn't care about himself. Oh, no. He cares about the little people he's left behind — the ones who aren't famous, who don't make his reported $7 million annual salary, and who are now more screwed than they were before Pelley opened his mouth.
'I don't care about me. It's not about me,' Pelley said, in this one-on-one profile about him.
'I am not emotional about this because I have lost this job,' he continued. 'I've done it for a long time. I've had the greatest experiences. But the people I leave behind, treated in this way? That breaks my heart, and it's going to take me a long time to get over it.'
Please. This is corporate America, where this stuff happens every day.
So weep not for Pelley, even as he tears up more than once during this interview.
Despite his emotional rantings, make no mistake: CBS News is in a losing business, and 60 Minutes, which Pelley holds up as the lodestar of television journalism, hasn't been good, relevant or dangerous since the days of Mike Wallace.
When you've got Dan Rather over at '60' questioning then-President Bush's military service using falsified documents (Rather claimed he didn't know), or Lesley Stahl insisting to Donald Trump that the Hunter Biden laptop 'can't be verified,' or Bill Whitaker having his Kamala Harris interview edited to make her sound more cogent — well, '60' has been a problem for decades.
So what is Pelley talking about, really?
As it turns out, those little people Pelley left behind after his rant — one imagines he fancies himself as someone akin to Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network, ranting, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' — well, they're not that impressed.
Nor are they thankful.
'What did he accomplish?' a CBS News source griped to the New York Post. 'He embarrassed the company and the leadership... This was Scott going off for show. This was just a show. He wants to stand up for journalism and maybe get fired, but what does it change?'
Exactly. A second source called Pelley's vocal outrage 'problematic,' adding that his 'grandstanding thing is insane… You're not taking down a dictator or someone who has committed war crimes. You're not interviewing Saddam Hussein. It was a little bit overkill.'
As are Pelley's claims that, as a journalist who has embedded in war zones, he is equal to actual combat veterans.
Shades of disgraced former NBC anchor Brian Williams, himself a conceited blowhard, who told lies about having flown into Iraq on a US army chopper that was hit and forced down by an enemy RPG.
Inspiration taken, perhaps, from Hillary Clinton and her lie about taking incoming sniper fire on an airstrip in Bosnia — disproved by actual video of her walking, calmly and definitely not dodging gunfire, on said airstrip.
'I've been in combat for this country,' Pelley said, 'in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kuwait. I've been shot at, spent nights in foxholes filling up with water in the desert.'
The unmitigated gall of Scott Pelley, a vainglorious television reporter who volunteered to embed in war zones, to compare himself to the men and women who put their lives on the line for this country.
He's a blowhard in an expensive suit and a daily blowout. He's a walking cliché, a combination of The Mary Tyler Moore Show's clueless Ted Baxter, William Hurt's performative TV journalist in Broadcast News, and Ron Burgundy of Anchorman.
You have to love the former CBS intern Brandi Kruse, now a conservative podcaster, who recalled being in the control room at CBS News when Pelley was filling in for Katie Couric on the nightly broadcast.
'He directed them to slowly push the shot in on him as he took his glasses off,' Kruse wrote on X. 'It was so fake… A few of the guys in the control room exchanged knowing glances, as if to say, "What a douche."'
As if to underscore that sentiment, Pelley told the Times that he and his wife were supposed to be on vacation in the Canadian Rockies, but he canceled that trip so he could attend that fateful meeting last week.
Surely, he's regretting that decision. The rest of us, however, are not. By getting himself fired, Scott Pelley just did American broadcast journalism an enormous favor.
