Day-to-day life at CBS has been interesting, to put it mildly, since Bari Weiss took over. The new editor-in-chief of CBS News has been tinkering with the news division of the Tiffany Network in a bid to salvage sagging ratings, and few shows have undergone more scrutiny than “60 Minutes.” The program that invented the TV magazine style has been a Sunday night staple since 1968; among the changes Weiss implemented were to bring in a new executive producer and let go of seven correspondents. However, former CBS News anchor and ’60 Minutes” contributor Scott Pelley was less than enamored with the changes, which he let everyone know in a highly volatile meeting that was leaked to the press. Pelley, according to sources, said of Weiss, “She’s murdering ‘60 Minutes’... She was brought in to kill this place!”
710 WOR’s Curtis Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning program dissected the reasons why the meeting minutes were leaked to the press in the first place, and what Scott Pelley’s subsequent meltdown was meant to accomplish. Larry drew upon his years of experience on TV news programs to rationalize that Pelley decided to raise a fuss at the meeting in the first place to appeal to the bosses not at CBS, but at any other network: “His contract’s coming up, and he’s already decided he’s out of this place. You get courage when your contract is coming up. You get courage when you know there’s a firing squad, and so, why not? Now he can have a following. Now everybody’s going to say, oh, look at that, he got fired because he spoke up for what he thought was right. No, no, no, no- he took the coward’s way out. He decided that he was going to make a show, which he would never have the guts to do if he was anchoring the CBS Evening News, because he’s looking for his next job.”
Larry also discussed why he feels the meeting was leaked to make Pelley look like the hero in this mess: “Listen, this was all planned. There’s no way Pelley didn’t know what was going to happen to him after this, so now he’s going to be a star on the left. Everybody on the left is going to love him. They might start a ‘60 Minutes’ and name it something else at ABC or NBC or one of the networks and it’ll be Scott Pelley leading it. He feathered his bed.”
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