Bari Weiss is doing everything completely wrong

Turns out, it's hard to pull one over on the crew at Sixty Minutes

Image courtesy of @Status, where you can read about the whole ugly, awesome episode

I admit that I felt (feel?) a little sheepish writing, once again, about the pig fuck drama over at CBS, but when I read the fantastic account of bossman/anchor Scott Pelley taking newly minted 60 Minutes overlord Nick Bilton out to the woodshed—in front of the entire Sixty team!—my unbridled enthusiasm got the best of me.

Apparently, the good dudes over at Status got a recording of the conversation (which, okay players, nice one), and the exchanges between Bilton and Pelley are [chef’s kiss].

Scott Pelley: you speak for all of us!

“Bari loves this institution,” [Nick] Bilton told staffers at one point during the highly contentious meeting. “She loves ‘60 Minutes.’”

“She’s murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” Pelley countered. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that.”

It’s easy to imagine a lot of people in that building (who don’t read this Substack) (and are shameless) fawning over Bari Weiss and her ill-gotten power, just as it is easy to imagine the uneasy 60 Minutes employees—those who hadn’t yet been unceremoniously fired—inclined to give their new, fancy “tech-savvy” boss, Nick Bilton, the, uh, benefit of the doubt. Institutionalists gonna institution, after all.

Not today, Satan.

Pelley pointed out that Weiss has “no qualifications for her job” and told Bilton “you have slender qualifications for this job.” Pelley, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” noted that the changes Weiss has made to that program “have been catastrophic.”

“So why should we expect any of this is going to be any better?” Pelley asked Bilton.

A sick burn, especially when coming from a Proper Gentleman like Scott Pelley, and also, conveniently, the truth. No one in TV (who wants to keep their job, which is most people in television) talks to their bosses like this, and most certainly no one aboard the Death Star CBS, where hierarchy is very nearly a physical reality.

So yeah, Scott Pelley coulda left it there—but he didn’t. Instead, he did something that literally every journalist in the Age of Trump needs to start doing a lot more often: defending the profession and those who practice it.

For months now, we have witnessed the president and his minions insult and degrade journalists… to the silence of fellow journalists. People sometimes ask me, as a former White House beat reporter, Why did no one speak up when Trump called that journalist, “Piggy?”

And my answer [usually] is: Because reporting, and especially the White House beat, is brutally competitive. Everyone is clamoring to get a question in, and better yet, an actual answer. But that’s no excuse. And these days, when the assault on the fourth estate is coming from both inside and outside the building, it is certainly not sufficient.

Scott Pelley showed everybody what it looks like to give a shit about the integrity of the news profession:

“I have many questions,” Pelley responded. “What was wrong with [recently fired 60 Minutes correspondent] Sharyn Alfonsi?”

As Bilton started to say he would “defer,” Pelley interrupted: “This is not the crowd to dodge.”

Bilton insisted he was not dodging.

“Nobody talked to you about that?” Pelley continued, pressing him on the firing. “They’re taking one of your correspondents away and nobody mentioned to you what was wrong with Sharyn?”

Bilton acknowledged that he “had conversations with people.”

“And what came out of those conversations?” Pelley asked. “They are private conversations?”

Bilton reiterated that he “did not fire” Alfonsi or [60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia] Vega. Charles Forelle, a top Weiss deputy and managing editor of CBS News, interjected, telling Pelley that he was being “rude.”

The Washington Post adds more color:

“You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” Pelley asked Bilton. “Why was Tanya Simon fired? Why was Sharyn [Alfonsi] fired? Why was Cecilia [Vega] fired? Why Draggan [Mihailovich]? Do you know the names of the people that were fired?”

Here’s Status, again:

Forelle—yet again—responded by calling Pelley “rude.”

“I’m not being rude,” Pelley shot back. “I have some pretty—you know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at five o’clock. Sending Draggan Mihailovich to HR to get fired, because nobody could look him in the eye. Not talking about Tanya’s contract. Not talking about Sharyn Alfonsi’s contract. Not talking about Cecilia Vega’s contract. Just calling them up and telling they were fired. That’s rude. This is a conversation. That is rude, and you were part of that.”

This is what we need to see a lot more of: journalists defending other journalists, making no exception for assaults on the profession and asking hard questions at inconvenient times. I mean, it’s a good bet that Scott Pelley won’t be at CBS much longer, but wow what a way to remind people of what principle and backbone look like under the leadership of Bari Weiss and Lord Collagen, David Ellison. What a way to remind a “legacy” news organization what a real legacy looks like.

Are the reporters at CNN reading this coverage? I fucking hope so, because they’re next: Ellison’s deal to take over CNN should be finalized by the end of the year. Anderson Cooper fired off a snippy statement upon his exit from the CBS/60 Minutes dumpster fire, but he’s gonna have to put his back into it, Pelley-style, when the Ellisons come raid his home base of operations.

Now, you might say that Bari and David will always have the last word, because they control the hiring and firing of these journalists, and therefore are able to dole out comeuppance as they see fit. But this mostly means that they will have to keep firing good/great reporters until there are none left. Furthermore, it will force Weiss and Ellison to hire even more stooges—people who have shitty enough reputations that reputational harm means nothing to them.

Yes, this will hasten the (inevitable) melt of the broadcast iceberg, but that was happening anyway (sorry) (I mean I’m on fucking Substack, so here we are). But along the way, it just might give journalists a way to recapture their souls and stand on principle and defend something that is essential to our democracy. Also, it’ll be hella embarrassing for the assholes left holding the bag, and there’s some real karmic justice in that.

Nick Bilton, of course, ended his meeting with the 60 Minutes team after only fifteen minutes, hustling out of the room with a supremely lame, supremely peevish exit:

“I just want to thank everyone for graciously being so welcoming,” Mr. Bilton said. “I look forward to talking to you in a one-on-one setting as these meetings are scheduled. And enjoy the bagels.”

Scott Pelley, meanwhile, stayed in the room, enjoyed those bagels—and received a round of applause.