Pelley made headlines for vocally challenging Nick Bilton, the new executive producer at “60 Minutes,” and calling out Weiss.
The veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent, who’d been with CBS for over three decades, reportedly said that Weiss was “murdering” “60 Minutes.”
Bilton fired Pelley on Tuesday night, saying that the correspondent’s “antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear.”
“Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together,” Bilton wrote to Pelley. “You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.”
Pelley said in a statement after his dismissal that CBS leaders had directed him to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”
Weiss told staffers in a Wednesday morning meeting that CBS News “had to part ways” with Pelley after his comments earlier in the week.
“Despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately, we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways. We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose,” Weiss said on the call.
Pelley disputed that characterization in a statement to The New York Times, saying, “Bari Weiss knows what she said is not true.”
“In the meeting on Tuesday, in which I was effectively fired, there was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back,’ as Weiss said in the editorial meeting,” Pelley said in his statement. “At no point did anyone in the Tuesday meeting suggest that there could be steps taken by either side that would lead to a resolution.”
