The real scandal lurking behind CBS' firing of Scott Pelley

When I was growing up in the pre-cable, pre-streaming '70s and '80s, there was this thing called “appointment television.” It meant a lot of people were watching the same show at the same time, because it was only on once. If you missed it, you’d have to wait for this thing called a “rerun” in the summer, when there was almost no original programming. Instead, the three networks, which were all we had besides a local channel here and there, just recycled all of the shows from their seasons, while everyone took the summer off, as if Hollywood were a school.

“Appointment television” in my house meant watching 60 Minutes every Sunday night on CBS. My mother would order Chinese food (Jewish, New Jersey, ‘nuff said), and my father would go pick it up, returning with a giant box stuffed with all of our Americanized favorites. It was the only meal of the week eaten in front of the TV as a family. We sat on the couch and ate off of small square side tables, each of which had a border of fake jewels, one of my earliest tactile memories.

My younger brother and I weren’t allowed to talk very much during 60 Minutes because we were LEARNING. “Sha!” my mother would hiss if we talked over Morley Safer or Harry Reasoner. “Quiet!” my father would yell if we dared say anything during Andy Rooney’s closing segment, his favorite part of the show. I’m now old enough to understand that my father wasn’t smart enough to absorb a lot of what we were LEARNING, which is why he preferred Andy’s pointed humor. Rooney smartly mocked dumb people, which included my father. Imagine if Donald Trump drove a delivery truck in Jersey; that’s who we’re talking about here.

The lineup of correspondents may have changed and expanded over the years, but one thing about 60 Minutes has always remained consistent:

Telling the truth.

60 Minutes has a venerable track record of exposing lies, cover-ups, and scandals, as well as interviews and human interest stories that made Americans aware of the world at large. No matter the subject, there was never a time when the audience questioned the veracity of what they were being told and shown.

But oh, how the mighty “Tiffany Network” has fallen.

Remember the heavily edited 60 Minutes interview Trump finally did just before the 2024 election, after whining about the interview Kamala Harris did? You might recall CBS News paid Trump $16 MILLION after he whined that her interview, which had been full of facts, was “deceptively edited,” causing him “mental anguish” and “confusion among voters.” When Trump finally sat for the interview, 60 Minutes ran one heavily edited version, while Trump released a heavily edited 73-minute version that was “more favorable.”

That was a glaring sign that we were headed down a very bad path, one paved with Putin propaganda.

CBS/Paramount is now under the control of a bunch of Trumptraitors, which is an astonishing thing to witness. The Ellison family has pledged loyalty to a convicted felon adjudicated rapist whose name appears in the Epstein Files nearly as much as Jeffrey Epstein's. They pushed Stephen Colbert out and pressured CBS News journalists to placate Trump instead of pushing for the truth.

But now the control of CBS News, the former home of Edward R. Murrow, was somehow handed to an inexperienced book editor whose biggest gigs were writing op-eds and reviews for The Wall Street Journal and The Forward, where she took a proud Zionist stance.

Bari Weiss is about as qualified to be the Editor-In-Chief of CBS News as I am to fly a rocket. Interestingly, she’s been following me on Twitter forever, but she’s never once responded to any of my tweets that challenge her loyalty to Trump over the United States of America.

Weiss has just hired equally inexperienced tech blogger Nick Bilton to help her commit treason and lie to the American people via CBS. Bilton tweeted that it’s “the honor of my career" to become the executive producer of 60 Minutes and then shared this tech bro-y introduction to his colleagues that set my skin on fire.

Poorly written propaganda isn’t supposed to be anywhere near legitimate news networks. Nothing about this is normal, yet it’s being normalized.

Bilton is the one who officially fired longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley on Tuesday, all because Pelley has this annoying habit of maintaining his journalistic integrity.

You can almost hear that in Trump’s voice, can’t you? Minus the bigger words, that is.

Scott Pelley was fired because he refused to comply with orders from Weiss and Bilton to lie to protect Donald Trump.

Read that again, because it’s true.

It’s 2026 in the United States of America, but Weiss and Bilton are deploying Nazi tactics from the 1930s to silence the truth.

Pelley responded to the firing by exposing the real reasons behind it. "New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” Pelley said in a statement. “I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them.

"Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”

Pelley has received tons of support online from his fellow journalists and other longtime admirers who respect him for standing up to the Trumpocrites. Meidas Touch has already offered him his own show on their network. Perhaps he can reunite there with Anderson Cooper and Cecilia Vega.

What will 60 Minutes be covering going forward? Segments about how we could all learn a lot from re-reading Hitler’s Reichstag speech?

Bye, Bari.