Scott Pelley says Bari Weiss personally pushed to alter a 60 Minutes episode about the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti hours before it was set to air, setting off a scramble that he said nearly knocked the broadcast off schedule. Pelley said the episode came within 19 minutes of missing airtime.
The disclosure landed Sunday, when published Pelley’s sit-down interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Pelley, who spent 37 years at CBS News and was fired last week after clashing with Weiss, said the episode centered on the ICE officer who killed Good in Minneapolis and that the last-minute email made the fight about something larger than one story.
Pelley said Weiss sent an email to his boss asking for changes that would make the protesters appear more violent and describe Good as driving toward the officer. CBS Evening News video of Good’s final moments does not show her driving toward an officer, and Pelley said that detail mattered because it went to the heart of what viewers were being told. He said on June 3 that new management had told him to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.
CBS said Weiss’s comments had no political motivation and were intended only to make the piece stronger, fairer and more accurate. Pelley did not buy that explanation. He said his impression was that she was putting a thumb on the scale for the administration and, as he put it, constantly looking out for the views of the president.
The bigger break, in Pelley’s telling, was not ideology but execution. He said the episode almost failed to make deadline, a reminder that the editorial dispute unfolded inside a news operation already under strain. Weiss took control of CBS last October, after Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison installed her as editor-in-chief shortly after buying The Free Press for a reported $150 million.
That background matters because CBS has already pulled 60 Minutes segments before, including one in December about the Trump administration deporting people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. The latest dispute now leaves one question hanging over the program: what exactly was in Weiss’s email beyond the two changes Pelley described, and how far was management willing to go before the broadcast was saved at the last minute?
