Scott Pelley, a former “60 Minutes” reporter, gave his view of how CBS News is changing under new management and ownership during an interview with NYT’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, who summarized the saga that led to his firing this way: “Pelley… was fired after an explosive series of events and much turmoil over the past few years at CBS. These events include a controversial financial settlement with President Trump over a 60 Minutes segment; the sale of the network to David Ellison; and the appointment of Bari Weiss, a former New York Times Opinion staffer and founder of The Free Press with no television-news experience, to lead CBS News.” Pelley’s firing came after Weiss dismissed several of his colleagues and hired a new 60 Minutes boss, Nick Bilton, whom Pelley clashed with in a staff meeting. Pelley says there is now a “subtle political bias” in favor of the Trump administration, and new CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss “doesn’t know what [she’s] doing.”

SCOTT PELLEY: My hope is that the leadership of Paramount will say to themselves: OK, this isn’t working. We have broadcasts that almost don’t get on the air. We have respected journalists saying there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over the other. We have a broadcast that is among the most important in America — the most successful in all of the history of television. It was doing great. So why are we making these changes? We need adult supervision and at the moment, we don’t have it. We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who, through no fault of their own, have no experience in television. It’s not their fault, but they don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes or at CBS News before. That is my hope, a return to sanity. A return to honor, a return to courage. We used to have all of those things in abundance and now we don’t. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News, in my view, is on fire.

As an example, Pelley cited the network’s coverage of the Renee Good incident as one time the network’s management had a “finger on the scale” in favor of the Trump administration’s preferred narrative.

SCOTT PELLEY: Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, Can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing was Renee Good’s car. “You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.” This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car, and you clearly see Miss Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her in that moment that I can’t repeat in polite company. So we have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives looking for those scenes, but it somehow wasn’t enough for Miss Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him. But that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described. LULU GARCIA -NAVARRO, NYT: To be clear, there were lots of videos that showed different moments of that interaction, and there was a big – many analyses subsequently about what exactly, through those various videos, had actually happened, including an excellent one by The New York Times. SCOTT PELLEY: The video that I showed in our piece clearly showed the officer’s feet. So, if he’s standing in front of the car, you can’t see his feet. And it very clearly showed that the wheels were turned away from him, what appeared to be the maximum turn until the wheel had stopped. NYT INTERVIEWER: So you get those suggestions, feedback from the sort of editorial chief of CBS News. What did you do? I mean, did you do as she asked? SCOTT PELLEY: I asked my producers, Look, I told you to find violent video of the protesters so we could represent that accurately. Now, I want you to go back and look again. Did we leave anything out that’s important? Did we make a mistake here? I don’t think so, but go back and look. And then I sat down with a video editor, and I went over the video of the Renee Good killing over and over and over again: stop motion, slow motion, etc. And realized that the event was not as the president said and not the way Bari Weiss remembered it. And so it’s late. Our deadline was noon. It’s now almost 5:00. That’s dangerous as hell. And so I decided that I wouldn’t do those things. I wasn’t going to get in a debate about it. I wasn’t going to call Bari Weiss about it. I was just going to refuse to make those changes. NYT INTERVIEWER: Did you change any language in the broadcast? Anything? SCOTT PELLEY: Not that I recall, based on her notes. But, as you probably are aware, when you’re doing a story, especially on deadline, a lot of things happen. There’s a lot of input, and you’re just scrambling to save everybody’s skin because you’re going to have a crash, which is what happened. Next day, I didn’t hear anything. Nobody called, nobody said anything. It occurred to me that maybe Bari Weiss didn’t see the broadcast and didn’t realize that those changes hadn’t been made. But that’s how that happened. There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News.

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