The anchor of “America's #1” news show has just been fired by new management. Serious charges after dismissal

CBS News, one of the largest TV news stations in the United States, fired Scott Pelley, the veteran presenter of the well-known “60 Minutes” show, on Tuesday evening, amid a tumultuous reorganization of the organization under new management, the BBC writes.

Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, fired a number of employees at the news channel last week, including the longtime executive producer, and named Nick Bilton as editor, even though he has no experience in television journalism.

The moves fueled concerns that network management would undermine independent journalism at the longest-running and highest-rated US news program.

At a staff meeting on Monday, Pelley accused Weiss of “killing 60 Minutes”, US media reported. Bilton branded Pelley “uncooperative” in a firing letter sent to the presenter.

The BBC says it has reached out to CBS News to get a point of view on the matter.

In a statement issued after his firing, Pelley accused the organization of becoming more politicized and forcing him to “introduce falsehoods and biases” into his work.

“I was told to include unverified claims,” ​​he continued.

Pelley also claimed that “incompetence and unprofessionalism on the part of the new management caused chaos.”

In the letter terminating Pelley's contract, sent Tuesday, Bilton accused the anchor of hijacking the staff meeting to disparage him, his qualifications and his intentions with “a remarkable lack of civility and contempt.”

“Your antipathy to the future of the show has been made clear and blunt. And I heard you,” Bilton wrote.

The new editor-in-chief also sent a separate memo to “60 Minutes” staffers, saying he made multiple attempts to have direct conversations with Pelley and couldn't find common ground.

“This was not the path Scott chose,” Bilton said in the letter, published by CBS News.

CBS News has a partnership agreement with Britain's BBC, which means news content, including video, can be shared. BBC News is editorially independent from CBS.

The upheaval within the US media organization had been going on since August 2025, when David Ellison, an ally of US President Donald Trump, bought CBS's parent company, Paramount.

Ellison named Weiss as CBS's new editor-in-chief in October. She presented a new vision for CBS News in the digital age.

Weiss told employees in January that CBS News was relying too much on traditional television and “wasn't producing a product that enough people wanted.”

“The reality is two-fold. The first: not enough people trust us. Not you. Us. I mean the mainstream media,” she said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Second: We're not doing enough to meet the audience where they are. So they're leaving us.”

Since then, CBS has laid off a number of employees — more than 6 percent of its workforce — and shuttered its famed radio division. After the final season of “60 Minutes” ended on May 17, the network fired executive producer Tanya Simon and longtime correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, hiring Bilton to run the show.

Cecilia Vega later said in a statement that the executives tried to influence the topics and “introduce political bias”, calling it “dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy”.

“Today, I lost an amazing job,” she wrote. “But I still maintain my integrity. To my former colleagues: keep up the good work.”

Pelley was the show's senior editor and anchor and was a correspondent for “60 Minutes” for 22 years. He worked at CBS News for 37 years and leaves with a “grateful heart,” he wrote in his statement.

Bilton is a former technology columnist for The New York Times and a documentary filmmaker. He said he was hired that Weiss brought him on while the audience for “60 Minutes” was growing — up 9 percent according to Nielsen ratings — but that that was not indicative of the long-term forecast.

“It's still the No. 1 news show in America. But history shows us that big changes don't happen immediately with new technologies — they usually happen years later,” Bilton told CNBC. “We're one step away from making that happen for traditional television.”