CBS - Pelley, 60 Minutes, Colbert...

Apparently after acquiring CBS, the Ellisons are trying to fill it with only people who are willing to parrot MAGA talking points.  Their news division is being decimated.  They are getting rid of one journalist after another.  Even comedians with political views, such as Stephen Colbert, are not immune to their chopping block.  The latest victim is Scott Pelley, who has been with CBS News and 60 Minutes for 37 years.  The fallout from that is continuing.  

Pelley did an interview over the weekend with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times.  You can see it HERE.   I highly, highly, highly recommend watching it.  I've also linked to the transcript version in the READ MORE section below.  If you only read it, you will miss the emotions, the hesitancy, the expressions...   

Heather Cox Richardson also has an important snippet of that interview in her June 7 Letters From an American post.  It's the second topic, just after the trump meltdown interview with Kristen Welker.  HCR highlights the part where Pelley tells how Bari Weiss, CBS News director, instructed the 60 minutes team to put an untrue spin on the story about the Renee Good killing by an ICE thug.  (I can't bring myself to call him an officer).

It's important to note that 60 Minutes has had a very good year before the firings.  Multiple firings make no sense at all.  It makes even less sense when you see that the people being ousted are being replaced by people without the qualifications and experience to justify their new positions.  It's so clear this is all politically motivated to please one man.
This snippet is from the Pelley / Garcia-Navarro interview:

Garcia-Navarro:  A few days before your firing, several high-profile “60 Minutes” correspondents and leaders were fired. Leading up to that, there’d been a lot of reporting about changes that were coming to the show. Was that the sort of change you were expecting? 

Pelley:  No one saw the Black Thursday massacre coming. This is our entire senior staff. Tanya Simon, our boss, she’s the first woman ever to be executive producer of “60 Minutes.” And she concluded this season with a growth in our audience of nine percent, which is unheard-of in broadcast television, and a growth of our online presence of 190 percent. Last season, we had 2.5 billion views. That’s a third of humanity! So we’re riding high.

The night before, Tanya and I were at the Emmy Awards, and we won two Emmys. Within hours, all of those people have been wiped out, and one-third of our correspondents have been fired. At the same moment, we are informed of our new executive producer. His name is Nick Bilton. I’m sure he must be a wonderful man, but no one had ever heard of him. He has zero experience in television news and no experience in management. So imagine how we feel when someone like that comes into a shop like “60 Minutes.”

Who's Who

Keeping up with the fast changing CBS story can get a little confusing.  It might help to know the cast of characters.

Scott Kelly

Scott Pelley - former CBS Evening News anchor 
- fired on June 2nd after heated discussion following mass firing of colleagues
- Pelley accused CBS leadership of attempting to "curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration."
- He also accused Weiss of "murdering 60 Minutes"

Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison

Larry Ellison - billionaire co-founder of software giant, Oracle 
- #6 on Forbes' 2026 Billionaires list
- In September 2025, he became the second person ever worth more than $400 billion, thanks to an AI-driven boom in Oracle's stock price
- In 2012, he bought nearly all of the Hawaii island of Lanai for $300 million
- sat on Tesla's board from 2018 to 2022. He owned 45 million split-adjusted shares before stepping down as a director
- owns nearly 50% of media giant Paramount Skydance, which formed after the nearly $28 billion (enterprise value) merger of Paramount and his son David's Skydance in August 2025

* My opinion - Larry Ellison kisses up to trump purely for business purposes.  He is one of the many greedy billionaires willing to align with anyone who can help them become even richer.  He is a perfect example of  "Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich."

David Ellison - Paramount Skydance CEO
- CBS' parent company, Paramount, merged with Skydance Media
- a billionaire and ally of President Donald Trump
- the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison
- Paramount Skydance is currently trying to merge with CNN's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery





Bari Weiss - new editor-in-chief of CBS News
- hired by David Ellison
- founder of The Free Press, a right-wing opinion website
- no prior broadcasting experience

Nick Bilton - new 60 Minutes executive producer
- hired by Bari Weiss to replace Tanya Simon
- former New York Times technology columnist and filmmaker Nick Bolton
- also known for directing and producing documentaries for HBO and Netflix


Tanya Simon

Tanya Simon - former executive producer of 60 Minutes
- was with the show more than 3 decades
- daughter of iconic longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon, who died in 2015.
- named interim executive producer in April 2025 upon Bill Owen's exit

Bill Owens - former 60 Minutes executive producer, who was with the program for over four decades
- left in April of 2025 due to disappointment in the network's new direction, and how parent company Paramount handled a lawsuit against 60 Minutes on behalf of Trump over an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. 
- "Over the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience." 



Note: At this time, Leslie Stahl is still a 60 Minutes correspondent, but her contract is set to expire this year.  She is 84 years old.  She and fellow correspondents, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, have announced they will stay

Cecilia Vega - 60 Minutes Correspondent
- fired without cause the same day Sharyn Alfonsi was forced out
- 60 Minutes' first Latina correspondent
- "In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,"
- "Let's call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven," Vega wrote. "It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy."

Sharyn Alfonsi - 60 Minutes Correspondent
- forced out in May
- feature on torture in Salvadoran prisons that held Donald Trump's deportees was abruptly pulled by Bari, leading to mass backlash
- "In the coming days, network leadership may attempt to hide behind corporate euphemisms like 'modernization' and 'restructuring' to explain away my departure. Don't be misled. This was not a routine corporate transition; it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting, and it sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,"

Draggan Mihailovich - the executive editor of 60 Minutes
- fired without cause

Matthew Polevoy - a senior producer of 60 Minutes
- fired without cause

Anderson Cooper - 60 Minutes Correspondent
- left 60 Minutes in May to "spend more time with his kids"
- a number of remarks he made on leaving raised eyebrows - At the end of his final show, he went on air and said, “I hope ‘60 Minutes’ remains ‘60 Minutes.’” That was seen as a swipe at Bari Weiss. 

More from the interview:
Garcia-Navarro:  It’s been reported that Bari Weiss was upset that Anderson Cooper’s comments had aired in that way. That’s my understanding.  Do you think that was part of the reason executive producer Tanya Simon was let go? 

Pelley: Yes. My understanding from people directly involved in that interaction is that Bari Weiss was quite livid that Anderson Cooper was allowed to say those things and that she, Bari, was not consulted beforehand, which in our normal course of business would not have been done anyway. I believe that was part of the reason Tanya was let go. But she wasn’t let go for cause. She was let go to create a space for the new person, Nick Bilton, to come in.

There are others who have left or been ousted from CBS News since Bari Weiss came on the scene.  


READ MORE 




The Interview: Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at ‘60 Minutes’ - NYT   This is the transcript.  I recommend viewing the video.  The link is towards the top of this page.

One Billionaire Trump-Aligned Family Will Soon Own All These Channels - HuffPost. Warner Bros. shareholders overwhelmingly voted to approve a major deal that would merge the old Hollywood juggernaut with Paramount Skydance, a mass media conglomerate headed by a close ally of President Donald Trump.  So close are they, in fact, that Paramount CEO David Ellison is reportedly set to “honor” the president at an “intimate” dinner on Thursday evening, just as Trump’s administration is weighing whether or not to approve the $110 billion takeover. Two nights later, a pair of top Trump administration staffers — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller — will be Ellison’s guests at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, attending with CBS News, which Paramount owns.

Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim say they’ll stay at ‘60 Minutes’ - NBC News  “We have had a hard time deciding whether to stay,” the three wrote in a memo to their colleagues at the program, before adding: “We don’t want to see ‘60 Minutes’ die.”  The longtime correspondents said that “as far as we can tell,” those leaders were fired because “they fought for our ‘60 Minutes’ values and stood up to protect our independence and integrity.”

Jon Wertheim, Bill Whitaker, and Leslie Stahl

Is Larry Ellison a Trump Supporter? A Clear and Current Examination - Legal United States - Despite cooperation, the relationship has not been without complexity. There have been instances where business decisions involving Ellison’s interests diverged from Trump’s public positions. These moments revealed that their alignment was not unconditional.  Such tension underscores that Ellison operates primarily as a business strategist rather than a political loyalist.

WHO TO BOYCOTT

Media the Ellisons control (or will soon control): 
TikTok
Warner Bros (including New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment)
Paramount
DC Studios
The Discovery Channel
CNN
CBS (including news and sports)
HBO
BETFandango
Rotten Tomatoes 
Nickelodeon 
MTV
Cartoon Network
Food Network
Travel Channel
Investigation Discovery 
Animal Planet,
Comedy Central 
Showtime 
TBS
TLC 
HGTV

WHO TO CONTACT

Your opinion only matters to our lawmakers if you let them know!  The more people who speak up, the more meaningful our opinions will be.  Don't wait to figure out the perfect people to contact or the perfect thing to say.  Just start!!!

Scott Pelley, former Correspondent 60 Minutes
https://www.instagram.com/scottpelley/
You can leave him a message there.

CBS 
51 W. 52nd Street 
New York, NY 10019-6188
212-975-4321

524 West 57th Street, 
New York, NY 10019
323-575-2448.
https://www.facebook.com/CBSNews
https://www.cbsnews.com/contact/

524 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

David Ellison, Paramount Skydance CEO 
1515 Broadway, 
New York, NY 10036
david.ellison@gmail.com

Bari Weiss, CBS News Editor in Chief
524 West 57th Street 
New York NY 10019

Brendan Carr, FCC Chair (Federal Communications Commission)
Federal Communications Commission
45 L Street NE
Washington, DC 20554


Some of CBS' largest spending advertisers-

Verizon Headquarters
1095 Avenue of the Americas,
New York City, New York 10036

AT&T Headquarters
208 S. Akard St. 
Dallas, TX 75202 

GEICO Corporate Office
1 Geico Blvd
Fredericksburg, VA 22412

Progressive Headquarters
6300 Wilson Mills Rd
Mayfield Village, OH 44143

State Farm Headquarters
1 State Farm Plz
Bloomington, IL 61701

Toyota North America Headquarters
6565 Headquarters Dr. 
Plano TX 75024

Ford Headquarters
1 American Road
Dearborn, MI 48126

McDonalds Headquarters
110 N. Carpenter Street
Chicago, IL 60607



MORE CONTACT OPTIONS