A year ago I wrote, after Scott Pelley gave a full-Trump Deranged commencement speech at Wake Forest,

“Scott Pelley has long been the most openly biased and partisan of the ’60 Minutes’ team (well, he and Leslie Stahl), and his speech is an instant “It isn’t what it is” classic. His arrogance and fury reveals a destructive, untrustworthy profession beginning to realize that the jig is truly up: they have betrayed their nation and its ideals, and nearly everyone knows it, or as President Trump so wisely observed, our journalists are indeed ‘enemies of the people.’ It is rumored that Pelley is likely to be dumped at CBS: Good.”

Well, it took a year and a turnover in management, but Pelley is finally out. The speech is fun to look back on today, because the pompous Pelley intoned, “America works well when we listen to those with whom we disagree and when we listen and when we have common ground and we compromise….To move forward, we debate, not demonize. We discuss, not destroy.” Yet when a new regime led by New York Times refugee Bari Weiss began the task of reforming the rotten “60 Minutes” Democratic propaganda machine that had embarrassed the network by editing Kamala Harris’s interview a week before the 2024 election to make her seem (sort-of) coherent—not an easy task—Pelley was no longer interested in listening, discussing, or compromising. He was determined to demonize. In a meeting called by Nick Bilton, the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Pelley accused Bilton’s boss, Weiss, of “murdering” the iconic Sunday news program. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that,” he said, adding, “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

He went on to mock Bilton’s assurances that he cared about the program. If Pelley had been trying to get fired, he could have hardly done a better job. And sure enough, he got his wish, as Bilton delivered the following “Bye-bye!” letter in short order: