SCOTT PELLEY BREAKS HIS SILENCE AFTER SHOCK CBS EXIT

Scott Pelley.Credit : 

Michele Crowe/CBS via Getty

Scott Pelley is opening up about his unexpected dismissal from CBS’s 60 Minutes.

In an interview with The New York Times, published on Sunday, June 7, the longtime journalist, 68, said that no one was expecting the “Black Thursday massacre,” during which the “entire” senior staff at 60 Minutes was fired. PEOPLE confirmed on May 28 that Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi were let go.

“The night before, Tanya [Simon] and I were at the Emmy Awards, and we won two Emmys,” Pelley recalled to the news outlet of the News and Documentary Emmy Awards, held in late May. “Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired. At the same moment, we are informed of our new executive producer.”

“His name is Nick Bilton,” he continued. “I’m sure he must be a wonderful man, but no one had ever heard of him. He has zero experience in television news and no experience in management. So imagine how we feel when someone like that comes into a shop like 60 Minutes.”

On June 2, the veteran correspondent was fired from CBS following a heated confrontation with Bilton, in which he allegedly accused editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of trying to “murder” the longtime news program.

Speaking to the NYT, Pelley remembered his initial reaction to being fired, saying, “Shock, dismay, impossible to believe, searching desperately for an explanation, knowing that an explanation would be forthcoming and then not seeing that. No executive at CBS News, our editor in chief, Bari Weiss, coming over to explain, to talk with us, to sit with us.”

“My colleagues and I have worked together 10, 20, 30 years,” he continued, adding, “So, these bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.”

In addition to claiming that there has been no formal explanation for the mass firings, Pelley also accused Weiss, 42, of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into politically sensitive stories — including coverage of the Minneapolis protests that occurred during the ICE crackdown.

After he and his team pulled together “images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively,” Pelley alleged that Weiss requested they “make the protestors look more violent” and describe Renee Good’s car as “driving toward the officer.”

“We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had,” he told the NYT. “We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss.”

In response, a CBS spokesperson told PEOPLE that Weiss had made “four points in the course of editorial back-and-forth” via email.

“They had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible,” CBS said in a statement. “As is frequently the case in any newsroom that operates with collaboration, not everything she raised made it into the final piece.”

Pelley’s claims come after CBS has covered several other controversial and political topics in recent months — including Pope Leo and President Donald Trump’s feud on foreign policy, the U.S. Army’s ignored request for support in Kuwait, hospice fraud — in addition to the piece on the Minneapolis protests.

“There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. That is why I am a journalist,” Pelley said through tears. “My hope is that the leadership of Paramount will say to themselves, this isn’t working.”

“They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before,” he concluded. “So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”