BENSON BYTE: "HE HAD IT COMING" - Joe Concha Reacts to the Firing of Scott Pelley, CBS' 60 Minutes Drama

with the Ron DeSantis administration at the time, who told Alfonzi, before this went on air, this is nonsense, you're barking up the wrong tree, this is not a story, this is not corruption, but she was determined to call Ron DeSantis corrupt, so she just ignored the warnings even from his own political opponents on the other side of the aisle. She was further to the left or had more of an agenda to harm him. than democrats in florida did on that issue amazing a he might as well just put rachel maddow on that position and remember at the time defantis was seen as maybe the next Republican nominee after Trump and what happened in 2021. So, yes, he was target number one. And as you said, Democrats came to the defense of Ron DeSantis, even saying this is BS and she went ahead with it anyway. And again, it was the editing after the fact, right? In other words, only putting in very, very small snippets of anything that supports. Well, it was all of it, right? She had this story that she wanted to tell, which was absolutely baseless when it comes to actual facts she was warned about that by Ron DeSantis and by his political opponents she ran the story anyway she also fronted that completely one-sided sort of tribute to censorship in Germany where every single interview in that piece on 60 minutes was pro censorship, not even a single dissenting voice in 11, 12, 13 minutes. That was another example, one of the greatest hits, the lowlights, if you will, from Sharon Alfonsie. Precisely. And you know how packages work. It's not just the correspondent, but also the producers and ultimately the executive producers that greenlight all this stuff. So that executive producer is now gone. Obviously, Alfonzi is gone. And now we have this. And by the way, just to get back to that one point around editing after the fact to shape a narrative, we saw that. Probably the most crystal clear example was Kamala Harris, October 2024. They literally changed her answer. We're stupid enough to put one answer out in the promo of the interview, and then what was presented on 60 minutes made her sound much more coherent. Then they wouldn't release the transcript or the video as they had done with Trump in 60-minute interviews in the past. So, yet this was a, for lack of a better term, this was a corrupt brand, which used to be the most respected brand in journalism for decades. So Bari Weiss comes in and says, okay, we have to change the culture. We have to change the way we go about these things. And then just to pivot to Scott Pelley for you. If we went into our bosses meetings, right, and started saying you're murdering Fox News, right? And started questioning the qualifications of our bosses. I invite not just us, anybody out there, go into a staff meeting next time and berate your boss and say he's not qualified. In any industry. Murdering the product. Any industry. It doesn't matter. You get fired. It's really that simple. So people go into this argument like they did with Jimmy Kimmel, oh, this is an attack on free speech. And this is...

attack on the First Amendment and a journalism trying to do his job. No, it's not. You can't do that. It's really that simple, and that's what happened. So Scott Pelly, one of the definite on-air faces that people might associate with CBS News, he has kind of an old-school effect, a bit of a windbag. type of character definitely enjoys the sound of his own voice although that's not unique to him in this industry obviously but he's decided that he is going to play the martyr so the new leadership held a meeting at 60 minutes. Bari Weiss had hired this new guy with not a lot of broadcast background, but lots of journalistic background, including, you know, really serious investigative journalism. And Pelley decided to berate and troll and attack this man and leadership repeatedly. And this guy whose name is Nick Bilton, he had said, well, Scott, why don't you and I chat privately? And Pelley was like, no, he wanted to make a big show of it. And ultimately, there were additional meetings. Pelly was reportedly intransigent again. And now he's been fired. I want to read, I know this will take a minute here, Joe, but I want to read the letter that was sent by this new executive producer of 60 Minutes, hired by Bari Weiss, Nick Bilton. He sent this letter last night. It leaked immediately. Now there's like leaks and counter leaks and Bari Weiss put out a statement and Pelley's responding constantly on social media. And there's a real sense of arrogance and entitlement around what Pelley is saying and his cadre of cheerleaders who are all on the left, by the way. It's sort of telling what's going on here. But here's the letter that was written. that describes management side of the story. And I tend to believe them because I think Pelley has decided that he's going to go down in flames in a certain way and he's got some sort of agenda that obviously he's been pushing. This is the letter that he was sent last night by his new boss that he had embarrassed intentionally in public. Dear Mr. Pelley. I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team. Joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career, and I'm grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I'm new to 60 Minutes, I've devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. 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 to 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 insolity and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort.

Yesterday's performance, it was a display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of a civil, private conversation. It demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show or approaching my new tenure with an open mind to collaboration and to progress. I'm here to deliver first in-class news programming not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal. Despite yesterday's misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you, today, we could find a path forward together. You made it clear that you are not interested in such a path. Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear, and I have heard you. I therefore... write on behalf of CBS News, Inc., to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause, effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter, sincerely Nick Bilton, executive producer, 60 Minutes. All right, so that was the letter that almost immediately leaked and went public. As I said, Pelley's been firing back, Joe. He's basically calling Billton and Bari Weiss liars. Bari Weiss saying that she wants to work in an honest and open newsroom built on trust and mutual respect. Quote, we cannot do our work without it. That foundation was broken on Monday and despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelly and find a way back. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do so, and so we had to part ways. We did not want that to happen, but that's the path he chose. So that's the account we're getting from management. He's saying they're not telling the truth. They wouldn't answer his questions on and on. That's a lot of setup, Joe. What do you make of all of this? Cheers to America's 250th birthday. Get 20% off your first purchase at Fox Newswineshop.com with code FM Radio 20. 20% discount excludes wine club offers and cannot be combined with any other promotion. Expires July 31st, 2026. Must be 21 order to order. Please drink responsibly. Okay. Well, if they wouldn't answer his questions, why would he reject going to dinner with Bilton, right? That's where he wanted to have a private conversation, all this laundry is not done in front of all of Bilton's new colleagues, right, people reporting to him. And if Bilton and Bari Weiss ended up... capitulating here after Pelly acted the way he did during that meeting because he isn't denying the fact that he said that you're murdering 60 minutes and not denying the fact that he questioned Bilton's qualifications in front of everybody. If they allowed him to stay, Nick Bilton wouldn't last six months there because no one would have respect for him because he would be seen as a pushover. And I'll give you two quick examples, guys. Number CNN, 23, Chris Lick comes in. He has a mission to make CNN more center-friendly, all right? and they invite candidate Donald Trump for a town hall interview with Caitlin Susan Collins. And then afterwards, what happens is Anderson Cooper goes on the air, okay? And I could not believe this when I heard it. I can't believe he actually got to keep his job, right? He said that...

I know what you saw tonight was disturbing. The man you were so disturbed to see last night, that man is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president. You have every right to be outraged today, angry, and never watched this network again. Anderson Cooper did that, kept his job, and Chris Lick was gone in a couple of weeks. Then I'll give you MSNBC. And by the way, I'll just point out Anderson Cooper also walked away from 60 minutes and his association with them over all of this. So that's the choice he's made. Fine. All right, go ahead. Fine. And then Ronne McDaniel is hired by MSNBC. That's what it was called at the time. She lasted 48 hours because, again, the inmates thought that they could run the asylum. You had Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Mika Berzinti. They did run the asylum, right? That was the problem. That was the problem, yeah. But it's not like they took it privately with management and said, oh, boy, I don't know if I like this hiring because, God forbid, they have one pro-Trump voice on there. And Maddow said this on her show. The fact that Ms. McDaniels, that now on the peril of NBC News to me is inexplicable. And I hope they reversed the decision. And sure enough, McDaniel's gone 24 hours later. And then talent was like, okay, see, we could do whatever we want here because management doesn't have the power. And that's what Scott Pelly thought was going to happen. And it didn't. Accountability. finally is in style. Let's continue here with another piece of this, one of the many missives that's been fired off by Scott Pelley, who's now, again, this new martyr-type figure on the left. And again, it's, I think, very revealing the people who are out there gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over his firing. He, in one of these statements, said, and I'm going to quote him, I have been in combat in Afghanistan. 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. Okay. Now, part of this is just his job. He was not forced at gunpoint to take those assignments. He wanted to do it, and he did it. There is some courage going to dangerous places to cover the news. I'm not going to take that away from him. But just in terms of phrasing, if you're trying to present yourself as Mr. Serious, unbiased newsman, and it's not about yourself, it's about the news product and what's being done to it and they're murdering 60 minutes, blah, blah, blah, to claim through at least very sloppy language that you were in combat. in two different wars, when he meant the combat zone covering it. But that's not the same thing as being in combat. And someone whose job it is to work with words knows that. And he certainly probably remembers the example of Brian Williams, a former network news anchor and his exaggerations about being in war zones. He didn't even go that far as Pelley did with this weird framing. I've been in combat. He said it twice. It really does feel like someone with no real sense of groundedness at all and trying to exaggerate in this pompous, self-important way. That statement was a big turnoff to me. Use the perfect word before a guy, and that is entitlement, right? This guy believes that he's entitled to keep his job for life because he did his job, took some assignments, as you said, in war zones, but was not in combat. Brian William vibes.

Certainly that's for sure. Well, Dan Rather also was in war zones. He was assigned and took the job in Vietnam. What's the frequency, Kenneth, right? It didn't an R.M. song eventually. And Dan Rather, then, in 2004, when he tried to influence a presidential election by running a fake story on George W. Bush's National Guard, and then it was later quickly revealed that the documents he used for that were fake. And then he was fired a year later. So could Dan rather just do whatever he wanted at CBS because he was in a war zone years ago? If that's the Scott Pelly argument, it's a bad one. And let me, can I read this for you real quick, because this is an introduction he did for an interview with Joe Biden, October 15, 2023. And this says it all in terms of what a hack this person was. You mean Pellet? I'll do it. Yeah, this is Pelley, all right? This is some narrating. All right. So I'll try to do my Pelly boys. Late Thursday, we met with President Biden at the White House. All right, that's bad. I'll just read as myself. It had been a rough week, and we could see it on him. Mr. Biden will be 81 next month, and he has said that when he's tired, his lifelong stutter can creep back in. But he wedged us into his schedule to express his commitments to Israel and the massacre of more than 1,000 civilians eight days ago, wedged him into his schedule. So I went back and looked. Joe Biden scheduled the day of that interview. He did one event in Philadelphia and was in Delaware at his beach house before 5 o'clock. Yeah, wedged in. So again, this is not a person who was objective and got fired because he talked back to his bosses. He's been doing this for years, and quite frankly, he had it coming. If you embarrass your bosses to their faces in front of everyone, you are not likely in any job to keep it. And he did this on purpose. I think either he felt like he was going to win this battle as previous newsroom revolts have turned out, as you pointed out, or he is happy to lose his job because he's a multimillionaire and getting older now. So go out in this blaze of glory and maybe become a resistance hero and all of that. That's the legacy he's building for himself. Whatever it is. I know a lot of the critics. almost exclusively on the left, are saying this is all the evil doings of CBS ownership and management and Bari Weiss and all of it. I think what we are seeing is an exposure of a deeply rotten culture at CBS News. And the question is, can they actually reform it or is it not reformable? But a very, very serious message was sent to everyone else over the last week. And we'll see. how others in the newsroom respond. Joe Concha, a Fox News contributor, best-selling author here on Guy Benson. Big, big turbulence in the media landscape this week. Joe, we appreciate your analysis. It's a labor of love. Thank you, guys. That was yet another Guy Benson bite. For full episodes of Guy Benson, go to Guy Benson.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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