Pelley’s fiery defense of the embattled news program, and his dispatched colleagues, landed him in the crosshairs of new brass Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton.

Tony Dokoupil honors former *60 Minutes *correspondent Scott Pelley, fired by new CBS News execs, on CBS Evening News

Pelley's fiery defense of the embattled news program, and his dispatched colleagues, landed him in the crosshairs of new brass Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton.

By Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman

Ryan Coleman is a news writer for with previous work in MUBI Notebook, Slant, and the LA Review of Books.

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June 4, 2026 12:01 a.m. ET

Tony Dokoupil in 2022; Scott Pelley in 2024. Credit:

Arturo Holmes/WireImage; Frazer Harrison/WireImage

- *CBS Evening News *anchor Tony Dokoupil honored *60 Minutes *correspondent Scott Pelley after he was fired by CBS News leadership.

- "He believed freedom of the press," Dokoupil said on Wednesday's broadcast, a day after the contentious firing, "was the right that guaranteed all the others."

- Pelley was fired after publicly challenging new CBS News leaders Nick Bilton and Bari Weiss, who promoted Dokoupil to anchor of *CBS Evening News *in December.

*CBS Evening News *anchor Tony Dokoupil on Wednesday paid tribute to Scott Pelley, the longtime *60 Minutes** *correspondent who was fired by CBS News leadership on Tuesday.

"When I started at CBS, Scott Pelley was in this very chair, and still doing a dozen stories a year for *60 Minutes. *And amid all of that, still meeting every new correspondent to share his view of the mission here," Dokoupil said on Wednesday's broadcast of the daily news program.

He then turned to American history to characterize the unprecedentedly contentious moment at CBS: "[Pelley] believed freedom of the press, to quote [James Madison], was 'the right that guaranteed all the others.' And the stakes are always that high in that, if you'd made it to CBS News, you were among the best in the world. He worked every single day to live up to that standard."

Scott Pelley, Bari Weiss, and Nick Bilton.

Michele Crowe/CBS via Getty; Leigh Vogel/Getty; Albert L. Ortega/Getty

The standards at CBS News were Pelley's exact concern in his final weeks and months at the network. It's been non-stop instability since last summer, when the first rumblings came that CBS parent company, Paramount Global, sought a merger with Skydance Media, a conglomerate owned by the Trump-aligned Ellison family.

The company made the unprecedented decision to cancel *The Late Show* amid its host, Stephen Colbert, emerging as one of the most strident critics of the Trump administration. Skydance eventually acquired Paramount, installing controversial opinion columnist Bari Weiss, who had no broadcast experience, at the helm of CBS News. Weiss appointed Dokoupil in December and oversaw a massive shakedown of the network's flagship news program, *60 Minutes*.

Since February, *60 Minutes *has shed four correspondents — Anderson Cooper, Sharyn Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, and now Pelley — as well as executive producer Tanya Simon and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Only three correspondents remain: Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim.

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During an explosive staff meeting on Monday, Pelley accused Weiss of "murdering" *60 Minutes* and told newly appointed executive producer Nick Bilton, a filmmaker and former tech reporter who also had no broadcast television experience, that his qualifications for the job were "slender."

"The changes that [Weiss] made at the *Evening News* have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?" Pelley asked during the meeting. After a follow-up meeting between Pelley, Weiss, Bilton, CBS News president and executive editor Tom Cibrowski, and a representative from CBS human resources on Tuesday, Bilton fired Pelley.

Bilton accused Pelley in termination notice that was obtained by * *of seeking to "disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt." He added that he'd "hoped that in sitting down with you [on Tuesday] we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path."

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Pelley fired back the same day, noting that "*60 *has been the number-one program in America for decades because our beloved audience finds integrity, quality, and humanity in our stories." But last month, the program "lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos."

"The new owner of our network is casting this legend aside," Pelley added, "apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration."

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