Scott Pelley Knew Exactly What He Was Doing in Trashing Bari Weiss

Weiss and the Ellisons have an utterly transparent ideological agenda. Thank you, Scott Pelley, for calling them out.

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss lost her initial battle against the staff of 60 Minutes. That was back in December, when she blocked the airing of a segment that highlighted the inhumane treatment at an El Salvador prison of Venezuelan men who had been deported from the United States and sent there. Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who reported the segment, wrote an email blasting Weiss’s decision that ended up being leaked and published widely. Weiss was criticized heavily in media and political circles. The segment aired a few weeks later with few changes. While Weiss was rapidly changing other parts of CBS News and shifting the network’s coverage to the right, it seemed she would not control the venerated 60 Minutes.

But Weiss was undaunted. Last week, CBS fired executive producer Tanya Simon, two other top editors of the show, Alfonsi, and Cecilia Vega, who was the show’s first Latina correspondent but also had tangled with Weiss. The editor in chief appointed Nick Bilton, a writer and documentary filmmaker with no experience in television news, as the program’s new executive producer.

That’s why longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley went scorched earth. In a staff meeting on Monday, Pelley said Weiss and her team were “murdering” 60 Minutes and mocked Bilton for his lack of experience. CBS unsurprisingly fired Pelley.

I am not sure if Pelley meant to be fired. But I’m quite sure he meant to create a firestorm and focus the nation on what’s happening: Bari Weiss, a center-right activist more concerned by Donald Trump’s critics than the authoritarian........

© New Republic