CBS News fires '60 Minutes' blowhard Scott Pelley after he dumps on Bari Weiss
Scott Pelley, a 68-year-old liberal who claimed in a commencement speech last year that "you only lose if you quit," has been a fixture at CBS News since 1989.
Although he was ousted as the anchor of "CBS Evening News" in 2017 — allegedly because he complained "to management about the hostile work environment," though his ratings also stank — Pelley clung to another position at the network, working for nearly a decade as a correspondent on "60 Minutes."
CBS News kicked Pelley to the curb for good on Tuesday — a day after the talking head reportedly volunteered a number of criticisms of the network's choices and personnel.
'I have been in combat.'
At a Monday staff meeting in Manhattan, Pelley hammered Nick Bilton, a newly hired executive producer on "60 Minutes," for his "slender" qualifications and characterized Bari Weiss, the blogger turned CBS News editor in chief, of being a hatchet man who is "murdering" the show and lacks a love for "this place," reported the New York Times.
Bilton, an English-born filmmaker and former tech columnist who apparently has no broadcast news experience, announced on Tuesday, "We have parted ways with Scott Pelley."
The purportedly slenderly qualified producer said in a missive to Pelley obtained by the Times,
I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt.
Bilton claimed that while he supposedly welcomes "a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate," Pelley's "performative display of hostility" demonstrated that he has "no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress."
RELATED: Polarization may be the cure — and the clarity — America needs
After emphasizing that Pelley's "antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear," Bilton told the liberal that his employment was "terminated for cause effective immediately."
Pelley, who complained in a woke speech last year that "journalism is under attack," wasted no time reminding everyone of his bravery and "devotion" to journalism.
"I have been in combat in Afghanistan," he told the Times in a phone interview after his termination, referring to his time as a war reporter while other men actually engaged in combat operations. "I have been in combat in Iraq. I have been in the war zone in Ukraine multiple times, risking my life and the happiness of my family because of my devotion to the broadcast."
Pelley claimed that Bilton's letter "betrays a complete misunderstanding of what we work for and what we live for at '60 Minutes.'"
Earlier in the day, the ex-CBS News correspondent stated that the "incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc" at CBS News, adding that the "collapse of values at the top has become untenable."
Pelley claimed further in another statement that the new owner of the network — Paramount Skydance — was casting aside the "legend" of "60 Minutes" in an effort to "curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration." He claimed further that new management had instructed him to "inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story."
CBS News did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.
Now with Pelley out and Anderson Cooper having bailed out last month, the "60 Minutes" roster of correspondents includes Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim.
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Fact-check: Legacy media’s bogus defense of DC’s safe-streets narrative crumbles under scrutiny
The Democrats’ media allies are arguing that President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., was unwarranted due to sharply decreasing crime rates. However, these reports do not provide a complete and accurate picture of the crime crisis in the area.
Since February, Trump has repeatedly warned D.C. leaders, including Mayor Muriel Bowser (D), that the federal government will intervene unless the nation’s capital is cleaned up.
'Unfortunately, while Fake News journalists and politicians go out of their way to claim otherwise, the reality is that our nation’s capital is anything but safe.'
Trump declared Monday “Liberation Day” for D.C., unveiling a plan to rescue it from “bedlam and squalor.” His decision to place the Metropolitan Police under federal control and deploy National Guard troops was apparently prompted by the recent mugging of a former Department of Government Efficiency employee.
“The murder rate in Washington today is bigger than that of Bogota, Colombia; Mexico City — some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth,” he said. “Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever.”
The legacy media was quick to portray Bowser as the victim, yet during a Sunday interview with MSNBC, the mayor admitted that D.C. needs assistance.
“We do need the federal government’s help,” Bowser said, listing several ways the Trump administration could assist, including “making sure that federal law enforcement is doing all of the policing that they can do.”
While Bowser thanked several federal law enforcement agencies for their assistance, she has still maintained that D.C. is “not experiencing a spike in crime but a decrease in crime.”
Many legacy media reports attempted to debunk Trump’s claims about high crime rates by referring to statistics from the Metropolitan Police Department. However, they failed to mention that the D.C. Police Union has long accused the MPD of manipulating its crime data to appear lower. MPD Police Commander Michael Pulliam was reportedly placed on paid administrative leave in May following the union’s allegations.
Gregg Pemberton, the chairman of the D.C. Police Union, explained how the MPD was allegedly altering the data. He stated that some of the department’s lieutenants and captains were instructing officers to file reports for lesser offenses.
“Instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification,” Pemberton told WRC-TV.
He alleged that crimes that should be reported as involving a suspect armed with a dangerous weapon have instead been documented as felony assaults. He noted that felony assaults are not listed on the MPD’s daily crime stats, and they are not a requirement of the FBI’s uniform crime reporting program either.
Pemberton claimed that there is “absolutely no way” crime in D.C. has declined as significantly as reported by the MPD.
RELATED: DC police commander under investigation for allegedly manipulating crime stats
As of Tuesday afternoon, the department’s website indicated that violent crime has decreased by 26% compared to last year. The MPD reported a 35% decline in violent crime from 2023 to 2024.
Yet FBI crime data indicated that by June 2024, reported aggravated assaults reached 375, a figure not seen since before 2020.
The FBI's data revealed that homicide rates have been steadily increasing over the past decade, peaking at 33 in August 2023. Reported robberies also reached a high of 501 in July 2023. Motor vehicle thefts have significantly risen since 2015, exceeding 700 incidents for three consecutive months in 2023. The most recent data shows 425 reported thefts in December 2024, which represents a 48% increase compared to the same period in 2014.
Initial data from the FBI is based on reports from local departments. Therefore, if the MPD manipulated its crime stats, those inaccuracies would likely still be reflected in the FBI’s recent reports. Additionally, FBI crime reports do not include data from D.C. for 2021 and 2022 because the federal agency was transitioning from its older Summary Reporting System to the National Incident-Based Reporting System.
Timothy H.J. Nerozzi, a foreign correspondent for the Washington Examiner, disputed claims that D.C. is safe.
“I am the man on the ground in DC here to tell you all that any journalists claiming the crime problem is anything less than horrific is intentionally lying to you. It is omnipresent from the Metro to the city outskirts. It is obvious and unignorable,” Nerozzi wrote in a post on social media.
Blaze News senior politics editor and D.C. correspondent Christopher Bedford claimed that just six weeks ago, he was "menaced" by "a dangerous, high vagrant while eating lunch."
"I lived here 18 years before I sold my house because violence and open-air gun markets had made my once-decent neighborhood unlivable for my family. I now commute," Bedford added.
A Washington Post report attempted to partially debunk Trump’s claims, but it was brutally mocked for quoting a resident who insisted that D.C. is “a safe city” but who chose to remain anonymous “over concerns of personal safety.”
“Washington, D.C., should be a symbol of pride and patriotism for the American people — and a safe location for tourists, residents, and public servants. Unfortunately, while Fake News journalists and politicians go out of their way to claim otherwise, the reality is that our nation’s capital is anything but safe,” a White House report read.
“Many residents don’t feel safe reporting crime,” it continued. “More than half of all violent crime in the U.S. goes unreported in the first place.”
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BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' reveals how the corporate media became 'proxies for the national security apparatus'
On the latest episode of BlazeTV's "The Coverup," host Matt Kibbe and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi discuss the recent collapse of the corporate media, attributing it to the industry's shift in coverage strategies in response to Donald Trump's first presidential election.
During this time, the press moved in lockstep to promote the Russian collusion allegations against Trump, while simultaneously suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. Later, the corporate media also collaborated to stifle COVID-era lockdown skepticism and the lab leak theory.
'You have people coming out of the National Security Council or the FBI, and they go right on air.'
Taibbi, one of the investigative journalists behind the Twitter Files, told Kibbe, "When Trump arrived, there was a belief that the old-school, objective form of journalism, where we tell you the stuff and you do what you want with it — that was the tradition for ages in America — that had to go out the window," Taibbi told Kibbe. "Now, it was too important. Trump was too dangerous."
Taibbi rejected this change, adding that "journalists should have distance from politics, even if we were opinionated." Instead of working in competition with one another, journalists began operating "as a team," he explained.
"It's anathema to how journalism, I think, is supposed to work," he continued. "I quickly found myself on the outs."
Kibbe credited the Twitter Files for revealing that a nonprofit organization had been "groom[ing] reporters to sing from the same song sheet and suppress stories before they even happened."
Taibbi stated that a group of the country's most prominent national security reporters were invited in 2016 to "war game what would happen if a story about Hunter Biden and Burisma and a laptop came out."
"This was months before the story came out," Taibbi said, noting that the reporters agreed to participate in the event off the record.
RELATED: Matt Taibbi looking to make congresswoman pay big-time for repeating her smear online
Kibbe described some reporters as "useful idiots."
"Maybe that's not fair," Kibbe said.
"No, I think it's worse than that," Taibbi remarked. "I think they're essentially proxies for the national security apparatus."
Taibbi stated that there are entire news organizations that have relationships with federal government agents, allowing for "a superhighway of information."
"One is broadcasting PR for the other, and beyond that, they're hiring people," he continued. "You have people coming out of the National Security Council or the FBI, and they go right on air."
Taibbi called it "a complete corruption and a complete breakdown of the system." He explained how the media suppresses stories.
RELATED: The media’s misinformation machine is built to last — here’s why
"If you go to work in these big organizations, it's not like anybody tells you, 'Okay, don't write this story, and do write that story,'" he said. "Over time, the values of the organization, they're sort of suffused through the entire bureaucracy. And even at the very lowest level, as a cub reporter, you learn very quickly what your editors want and what they don't want."
"You just learn, 'Well, this is what's gonna get me promoted. This is what's gonna get me a better gig.' And you start writing those stories," he added.
Taibbi noted that reporters with "difficult personalities wash out eventually."
He concluded that the "corporate media is done now" because "they've now screwed up so many stories."
"Even if they try to reorient themselves in the direction of journalism, they're gonna have to start at square one. And they're gonna be beaten out by all these independent sources that are already way ahead of them," Taibbi said.
Blaze News asked Taibbi how he sees the evolution of America's media landscape over the next decade, considering that corporate outlets are experiencing a significant credibility crisis.
"Obviously independent sources will benefit both from a trust standpoint and in terms of audience as the corporate press deals with fallout from mistakes and politicized coverage," he responded.
"The U.S. has a long history of innovating new journalism forms, and I'm pretty confident something great will emerge. However, the new media landscape still hasn't figured out how to monetize long-form investigative reporting, nor does it have the ability to fund full-time beat writers or foreign bureaus yet," Taibbi stated. "So there are serious gaps."
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Chip Roy honors heroes saving kids in deadly Texas flood and exposes media lies on 'The Glenn Beck Program'
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) joined "The Glenn Beck Program" on Monday morning to provide an update on the devastating flash flood that killed at least 82 people, including 28 children, in Kerr County.
Roy highlighted the community's heroism and torched the legacy media for sharing baseless falsehoods about the government's response in the wake of the natural disaster.
'This is just the kind of hateful rhetoric that comes out of people that want to politicize everything, demean everything.'
The congressman noted that he typically spends each Fourth of July with his family in Kerrville to attend a concert, but he spent it in Washington, D.C., this year after President Donald Trump's team requested he stay for the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
"I've spent most of the last three days [in Kerrville]," Roy told Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck. "There's long waiting lines for people to volunteer."
He called the community's support "a great testimony to the strength, resolve, [and] compassion of not just people at Kerrville but across Texas and the whole country."
RELATED: Horror and heroism in Texas as search for flood survivors continues
Roy blasted legacy media for "politicizing" the tragedy and spreading false information to criticize the Trump administration.
"The finger-pointing, generally, is just offensive," he told Beck. "We're down on the ground with first responders, trying to find people, and we're trying to clean up debris, and we're trying to help a community heal."
He shared stories of "tremendous acts of heroism," including Jane Ragsdale, a longtime camp director, and Dick Eastland, a Christian summer camp owner, who both died while trying to save children from the flash flood.
"You got a camp director, who died trying to save little girls, and I'm there with his daughter, who is now there with the families of the people who lost their little girls at this camp, and she was there because she loves them. Do you know how hard that was?" Roy stated. "And then you got these people like [CNN's] Dana [Bash], who were out there making this conjecture about budget cuts or the Trump administration didn't have people there, which, first of all, is false. It's just not true."
"My observation of all this is, the president, the federal government was doing what they normally do and more," he said.
Roy further slammed the media for "tracking down the family members" and publishing photographs of the children from families' social media posts.
He also addressed comments from Sade Perkins, a former member of the Houston Food Insecurity Board, who claimed that Camp Mystic was a "white-only, conservative [and] Christian" program.
Roy called Perkins' claims "totally false" and "absolutely ridiculous," adding that the camp "welcomes anybody and everybody."
He told Beck, "This is just the kind of hateful rhetoric that comes out of people that want to politicize everything, demean everything. Everything has to be woke, everything has to be this [diversity, equity, and inclusion] ideology that's destroying our country."
"The fact is, these are really, really good people who are dedicated to the mission of advancing the Kingdom of Christ and doing so with these historic camps that have been multigenerational along a great and beautiful part of the rivers in Texas," Roy added.
Roy emphasized his commitment to working with local, state, and federal officials to prevent future "extraordinary" tragedies, stressing that installing warning sirens may be an urgent first step.
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CNN's fake news fumble: Shaky anonymous sources backfire as Trump's Iran strike proves devastating
Following President Donald Trump's strike on Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, CNN hastily seized an opportunity to criticize the administration by reporting a leaked early assessment, leaning on several anonymous sources who incorrectly claimed the attack caused minimal damage. Subsequent findings of widespread destruction revealed CNN's misstep and further highlighted legacy media's over-reliance on shaky insiders, desperate to downplay conservative wins.
On June 25, CNN published an "exclusive" article from correspondent Natasha Bertrand and two other network reporters questioning Trump's claims that the strike "completely and totally obliterated" Iran's sites, citing "seven people briefed" on a top-secret early Defense Intelligence Agency assessment.
'Why did you hire someone so patently averse to the facts, considering she claimed Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation?'
One source told CNN, "So the (DIA) assessment is that the U.S. set them back maybe a few months, tops."
Two unnamed individuals told the news outlet that the strike did not destroy Iran's enriched uranium stockpile, one claimed that the centrifuges were still "largely 'intact,'" and another alleged that the uranium was moved before the attack.
RELATED: Joy Reid blames Israel for Iran seeking nukes in shouting match on CNN
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN that the initial assessment was "flat-out wrong" and torched "an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community" for leaking the top-secret report to the network.
Still, after later assessments confirmed the administration's claims that the facilities were significantly damaged, CNN clung to its initial narrative and defended its journalists.
"We stand 100% behind Natasha Bertrand's journalism and specifically her and her colleagues' reporting of the early intelligence assessment of the U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear facilities," CNN stated. "CNN's reporting made clear that this was an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence. We have extensively covered President Trump's own deep skepticism about it."
"However, we do not believe it is reasonable to criticize CNN reporters for accurately reporting the existence of the assessment and accurately characterizing its findings, which are in the public interest," CNN's statement added.
Conservative media critics slammed CNN's strike coverage, blasting the network and other legacy media outlets for their pattern of leaning on dubious, left-leaning sources who consistently miss the mark, as seen during the COVID-era alarmism, the suppression of Hunter Biden's laptop story, and the downplaying of former President Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline.
'They should be prosecuted!'
Curtis Houck, managing editor of Media Research Center's NewsBusters, responded to CNN's statement.
"Why did you hire someone so patently averse to the facts, considering she claimed Hunter Biden's laptop is Russian disinformation?" Houck wrote, referring to Bertrand. "Or perhaps it's because you know she's a partisan who will take whatever the Deep State hands her and run with it?"
Chad Prather, host of "The Chad Prather Show," asked CNN, "How bout all the other things you've lied about?"
Conservative commentator Vince Dao wrote, "Firstly, you blatantly misrepresented what that report even said. Secondly, [you're] literally spreading Pentagon propaganda to justify a war. How does it feel to abandon everything the 'free press' stood for 20 years ago? Pathetic."
RELATED: Pete Hegseth obliterates media over leaked assessment of US strike on Iran
As recently as Monday, CNN was still trying to push the narrative that the Trump administration's attack on Iran was largely unsuccessful.
The outlet published a report stating that Rafael Grossi, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog chief, claimed it would take Iran only "a matter of months" to restart enriching uranium.
The article reads, "Rafael Grossi's comments appear to support an early assessment from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, first reported on by CNN, which suggests the United States' strikes on key Iranian nuclear sites last week did not destroy the core components of its nuclear program, and likely only set it back by months."
The article cited Grossi's comments to CBS' "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," during which he explained that the strikes caused "severe" but "not total damage."
"They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that. But as I said, frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there," Grossi said.
On Friday, a CNN spokesperson told the New York Post that the outlet had received a letter from Alejandro Brito, Trump's attorney, accusing it of defamation and demanding a retraction. CNN defended its reporting.
Trump called for those who leaked the assessment to be prosecuted.
Last week, in a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote, "The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran. They should be prosecuted!"
A CNN spokesperson confirmed to Blaze News that the outlet received a letter from Trump's lawyer, responded to it, and rejected the claims made.
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