Now-former “60 Minutes” correspondent and CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley taunted the long-running news documentary’s newly appointed executive producer, Nick Bilton, during the new leader’s first-ever staff meeting during a tirade that quickly resulted in the veteran reporter’s firing.

Among much else in an insulting barrage, Pelley declared Bilton’s qualifications to be the “60 Minutes” executive producer “slender,” and he accused Bari Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief of “murdering” the program by firing the former producer and a half-dozen other staffers. Weiss, according to Pelley, “does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

Bilton’s response was quick and predictable, given Pelley’s intemperance.

“You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama,” Bilton told Pelley in his letter of termination.

Bilton reminded Pelley that he had reached out and invited him to a private dinner to discuss things, an invitation Pelley ignored: “It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead ... I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility-enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress.”

Pelley would subsequently express amazement that he was fired, a claim so detached from workplace reality that it is exceeded only by his ludicrous claim of objectivity in his reporting portfolio and his parallel accusation against Bilton and Weiss of pro-Trump bias and unstated intention to kill “60 Minutes.”

Having myself been in more news staff meetings during my long career as a journalist than I care to recall, I’ve witnessed more than a few shouting matches between feuding editors. But none of those even remotely approached the intensity of insult displayed by Pelley in Bilton’s introductory meeting with the “60 Minutes” staff.

Nobody who has worked in a news operation — print, broadcast, cable, or internet — in the past century would be surprised by Pelley’s termination. You just don’t tell your executive producer he or she is no good before you’ve even had an opportunity to work with him long enough to arrive at an evidence-based assessment. And even then, common standards of civility dictate directness, with diplomacy, not derangement.

With that said, let’s now focus on Pelley’s most unbelievable claim, that of being an objective reporter of the news. Here, courtesy of Gallup in its 2024 survey was how the big majority of Americans viewed the mainstream media: “Americans continue to register record-low trust in the mass media, with 31% expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of confidence in the media to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly,’ similar to last year’s 32%.

“Americans’ trust in the media — such as newspapers, television and radio — first fell to 32% in 2016 and did so again last year,” Gallup continued. “For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33% of Americans express confidence ‘not very much.’”

One year later, Gallup found trust in mainstream media at a new low, reporting “Americans’ confidence in the mass media has edged down to a new low, with just 28% expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘fair amount’ of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.”

And it’s not just Gallup. Pew Research has been polling the American public’s trust of mainstream media for years. A decade ago, Pew found between 2016 and 2025 a 20-point decline in the percentage of adults who say they have “a lot” or “some” confidence in the mainstream media, from 76% to 56%.

Note that neither the Gallup nor the Pew surveys are ideological measures, but only trust. And what both show beyond doubt is the mainstream media has for years become less and less trustworthy in the eyes of everyday Americans. We’re not talking bias for the Left or Right, but rather that most essential characteristic of news reporting, the trust of readers that you are presenting the facts “without fear or favor.”

Pelley has never left any doubt about his own political judgements, as is seen in the abundance of examples from his reporting. To cite just one such instance, Trump had been in office barely a month in February 2025 when Pelley interviewed Marc Elias, the Democrat’s first choice for litigation involving blatant partisan interests, regarding the Chief Executive’s oft-expressed view that his 2020 re-election campaign was defeated through widespread voter fraud.

“It was nearly impossible to get anyone on camera for this story because of the fear now running through our system of justice,” Pelley told viewers. Elias obviously was not afraid of sitting down with Pelley and it was quite literally unbelievable to portray the lawyer as anything other than a highly partisan defender of Democratic interests regarding allegations of voting fraud.

What Pelley either doesn’t know or refuses to acknowledge is the reality that Americans no longer trust the mainstream media of which Pelley has been a prominent and much-honored fixture for several decades. And as it happens, there is a former CBS News colleague of Pelley’s who is just the right person to make that introduction. Bernard Goldberg was at CBS News for 28 years as a widely respected professional journalist. For 11 of those years, Goldberg and Pelley were both doing national news reporting for CBS News, so it’s not like they are strangers. Goldberg, by the way, has never hesitated about identifying himself as a liberal, and he was recognized with multiple Emmy Awards during a career as a reporter, editor, and producer.

Goldberg, who wrote a New York Times best-seller on the issue, put it simply during a 2002 PBS interview: “There is a pervasive liberal bias in the mainstream media … when you say motive, there’s an implication that it’s malicious. It isn’t. It isn’t. The problem is that, if you travel in Washington and Manhattan circles, if you travel with friends who are largely smart, hip, sophisticated, and liberal, that after a while, you won’t see your view and their views as liberal views, but simply as civilized views.”

In other words, you lose touch with reality. Like Scott Pelley.