60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley fired by CBS News after clash

Move comes after meeting in which Pelley said network chief Bari Weiss was ‘murdering’ news show

Scott Pelley, one of the most well-known and respected journalists in broadcast journalism, has been fired by CBS News after clashing with network brass over last week’s severe round of cuts at 60 Minutes , the show he has worked on since 2004, the Guardian confirmed.

While changes were long expected at 60 Minutes , CBS News management shocked staffers last week by firing the network’s executive producer, executive editor and two correspondents, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, without giving a specific reason for their terminations.

During an extremely heated meeting on Monday morning with the show’s newly appointed executive editor Nick Bilton, along with another CBS News executive, Pelley rebuked Bari Weiss, the longtime opinion commentator who joined the network in October as editor-in-chief.

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes,” Pelley said, as first reported by the Guardian. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”

A source close to the network said that executives had attempted to meet with Pelley after the terminations on Thursday, to no avail.

Ultimately, Pelley met with Weiss and fellow executives on Tuesday, and she conveyed that his behavior was inappropriate. Pelley then told members of the show’s staff that he expected to be terminated, sources said.

Pelley received a message from Bilton on Tuesday evening informing him that he had been “terminated for cause effective immediately”. In the message, which was first reported by Puck’s Dylan Byers, Bilton called out Pelley’s conduct in the meeting. “Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” he wrote.