The New York Post usually gets it right.
But calling Scott Pelley in its headline Monday a “star” is overdoing it by about half.
Fact is, 60 Minutes ever only had one real bonafide star – Mike Wallace, the famous trenchcoated muckraker.
If Pelley was a “star,” it was only in his own mind.
He has now been canned twice by CBS News, the first time being when he failed to build an audience as anchor of the CBS Evening News.
Pelley’s latest axing came a day after he whined about the new president of CBS News, pro-Trumper Bari Weiss.
Nick Bilton, the news magazine’s executive producer recently installed by Weiss after she took the helm of CBS News, let it all hang out in a letter to Pelley.
“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” Bilton wrote, referring to Monday’s heated face-off between the journo and his boss.
Bilton further accused Pelley of staging a “performative display of hostility,” claiming he had “no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress,” the Post reported.
The New York tabloid quoted sources saying Pelley during the meeting had told Bilton he had “slender” qualifications for the job and would “never be welcome here.”
Bilton fired back: “You are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people.”
The correspondent also accused Weiss of “murdering ‘60 Minutes’” and claimed she “was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that,” the Post said.
“I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama,” Bilton wrote.
Pelley has been at CBS nearly 40 years, including a stint on the nightly anchor desk for six of them.
Weiss, a former op-ed and book-review editor at The Wall Street Journal, later as a New York Times editor blasted a liberal women’s group for going after Trump.
She wrote a column in 2018 arguing that the left wing was increasingly intolerant of alternate views.
Weiss resigned from the Times in 2020, receiving praise from a group of Republican U.S. senators for her blasting the paper as answering to liberal Twitter critics.
She has also been a critic of cancel culture, calling it un-American.
Shortly after she took over CBS News last fall, Pelley complained she was a Trump supporter.
