Fired CBS 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley has accused editorial management at his old network of interfering with a broadcast segment looking at an immigration officer’s killing of Minneapolis protester Renee Good in January.
The veteran broadcaster, who was recently dismissed from the show, said CBS News’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss had sent an email to his supervisor requesting changes be made soon before the airing of the segment in question.
In an interview with the New York Times published on Sunday, the 68-year-old Pelley accused Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into programming.
Pelley told the outlet: “Two of the things in the email include, ‘Can we make the protesters look more violent?’ Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”
Pelley maintained that was the direction contained in the email even though video of Good’s shooting did not support such a conclusion.
A CBS News spokesperson told the Times in response to Pelley’s statements that Weiss had made four points in an email exchange on the segment that had “no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible”.
“Not everything she raised made it into the final piece,” the statement added.
Pelley’s accusation comes amid turbulence at the vintage TV news show that has seen 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon replaced and several correspondents and producers leave over questions of editorial independence. Three of the show’s veterans – Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, – are staying on.
Newly-installed executive producer Nick Bilton, a former Vanity Fair journalist and filmmaker, told staff in a memo that “the foundation of 60 Minutes is journalistic independence.
“We will always pursue stories without fear or favor.”
Pelley’s accusations to the Times followed a heated exchange at a meeting on Monday in which he accused Weiss of “murdering” the show. He was fired soon after.
In his latest salvo, Pelley said he was concerned that Weiss “had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News”. He also called her lack of TV news experience “red flags to me”.
Pelley also said that Bilton’s mission to modernize the 58-year-old show ignored changes that were already in play.
“Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous,” Pelley said. “It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is.”
Pelley’s accusations over the Minneapolis segment in part centered on what took place in the seconds before Good was shot by an immigration enforcement officer.
“On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car,” Pelley told the Times. “You clearly see Ms Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head [and] kills her.”
Pelley also alluded to cell phone video from the officer’s vantage point that was publicly released and captured him calling Good a “fucking bitch”.
As Pelley put it, the officer said “something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company”.
Pelley said that 60 Minutes had “gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had … somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms Weiss”.
He added that video of the shooting showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t “driving toward him”. He argued that Weiss “wanted it described that way” because it echoed what Donald Trump said of the shooting in his capacity as president.
Asked to respond to Pelley’s claim that Weiss “was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the [Trump] administration”, CBS News said there was “no credible argument” to suggest she was doing that.
