Bari Weiss Breaks Silence on Scott Pelley's CBS Exit: 'We Had To Part Ways'

The CBS News editor in chief told staffers that repeated attempts to engage with the veteran 60 Minutes correspondent had failed, leaving the network no choice but to move on.

Bari Weiss defended the firing of Scott Pelley in remarks to CBS News staff.
Weiss said the network tried to engage with Pelley before the split but those efforts did not succeed.
Pelley had been a fixture at 60 Minutes for decades and served as anchor of the CBS Evening News.
The departure is the latest flashpoint in ongoing tensions at CBS News since Weiss took the editor in chief role.
No severance terms or official statement from Pelley had been made public at the time of filing.

It was not the kind of all-hands message anyone at 57th Street puts on the internal calendar by choice. Bari Weiss, the editor in chief CBS News installed to oversee a widely watched editorial overhaul, addressed staff this week about the exit of Scott Pelley — the correspondent and former Evening News anchor who had spent the better part of four decades as one of the more recognizable faces in American broadcast journalism.

According to reporting by Deadline, Weiss told staffers the network “had to part ways” with Pelley after attempts to engage with him did not produce a workable path forward. The remarks were framed as an explanation rather than an apology, the kind of management-to-newsroom communication that lands differently depending on which desk you sit at.

Pelley joined CBS News in 1989 and anchored the CBS Evening News from 2011 to 2017 before returning full-time to 60 Minutes, the Sunday institution he had reported for across multiple stints. His profile at the broadcast remained high enough that his departure registered well outside the media trade press.

Weiss has been a polarizing appointment since her hiring was announced, drawing sharp reactions from inside the building and from the broader press-criticism ecosystem. The Pelley exit adds another named figure to a running tally of changes under her tenure, and it arrives at a moment when 60 Minutes itself has been navigating its own publicized internal pressures.

A spokesperson for CBS News had not issued a formal statement on the separation terms as of the Deadline report. Pelley had not made a public comment.