The RealClearPolitics panel split Monday over Scott Pelley’s emotional New York Times interview about his firing from 60 Minutes and turmoil at CBS News. Carl Cannon defended Pelley’s anger as loyalty to longtime colleagues, while Tom Bevan and Andrew Walworth mocked what they saw as self-aggrandizing melodrama. Pelley said CBS News is “on fire” under new management and said the news editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, “does not know what she is doing,” in a very personal, emotional interview with the New York Times. I am not emotional about this because I have lost this job, Pelley said. I’ve done it for a long time. I’ve had the greatest experiences. But the people I leave behind, treated in this way – that breaks my heart. Cannon said he would do the same if he saw his colleagues being mistreated, and defended Pelly’s reaction to the abrupt firing of “60 Minutes royalty,” Tanya Simon, who worked there for decades. “There’s no such thing as ’60 Minutes’ royalty,” Tom Bevan said. “These are not lifetime appointments. ’60 Minutes’ is not the Supreme Court.” Folks on the left are viewing him as some sort of hero, Bevan said. He was playing into this caricature of journalists being like firefighters running into burning buildings, when actually what he does is just read words on a prompter that other people have written. Walworth read aloud one of Pelley’s anecdotes about Mike Wallace throwing a script into the air during an argument with 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt, causing a piece of paper to cut an associate producer’s face. Cannon continued: “His friends were fired. The network’s changing. People were put in charge of him who he thinks have no experience in television, because they have no experience in television, and he’s angry… It’s called love of your colleagues. Andrew Walworth cut through the debate, noting, “It was so much about him – that’s what I got, before reading the best anecdote from Pelley’s interview aloud: “There was a screening once with Mike Wallace and the executive producer and founder of 60 Minutes, Don Hewitt, got into a big argument about a script. Wallace jumps up in the middle of the screening, throws his script up in the air, and yells at Don: Well, then you write the effing thing.’ One of those pieces of paper comes down and slices an associate producer across the face. He’s bleeding now. He’s got a paper cut on his face.” Bevan added that the most glaring thing is Pelley’s apparent disbelief that viewers might have seen ’60 Minutes’ as biased before now. “That’s delusional,” he said. “That’s part of the problem.”
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