# Scott Pelley Broadcast journalist (b. 1957, San Antonio), a *[[60 Minutes]]* correspondent from 2004 and anchor of the *CBS Evening News* 2011–17, fired by [[CBS News]] on **June 2, 2026** — the most senior casualty of the network's capture and the person whose account of it is on the record. He started at 15 as a copyboy at the *Lubbock Avalanche-Journal*, came to CBS in 1989, covered the first Gulf War, the Oklahoma City bombing and Bosnia, was the White House correspondent through the Clinton impeachment, and was the network's lead reporter on 9/11 and the Iraq War. At *60 Minutes* he was the correspondent of record on the financial crisis, the Boston Marathon bombing, [[Syria]]'s chemical attacks and the pandemic, with the awards to show for it — dozens of Emmys, Peabodys, duPonts. ## The firing Pelley's collision with the new management was public before it was final. His May 2025 Wake Forest commencement speech — "our sacred rule of law is under attack, journalism is under attack, universities are under attack" — was read inside the company as an attack on the settlement then being negotiated with the President; in his April 2025 on-air sign-off for the departing executive producer [[Bill Owens]], he told viewers that Paramount had "begun to supervise our content in new ways" and that "none of our stories has been blocked, but Bill felt he lost the independence that honest journalism requires." Under [[Bari Weiss]], installed as editor-in-chief in October 2025, the friction became a fight; on June 1, 2026 he confronted the show's new executive producer [[Nick Bilton]] in front of staff and accused Weiss of "murdering the show." He was fired the next day. His statement said management had instructed him to "inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story" and that the network was discarding him "to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration." [[Scott Pelley Firing]] has the sequence and the sourcing; the [[CBS News]] page places it as the final step of the capture and the [[60 Minutes]] page as the third executive-producer turnover in eighteen months. ## Why he matters here The vault's [[Media Capture]] argument is that capture needs no order and no hostile owner — only a transaction and a sequence of people who leave. Pelley is the person who declined to leave quietly, which makes his testimony the one first-hand account of what the sequence felt like from inside the newsroom. That it comes from the most conventional, least ideological figure at the network is the point. ## See Also - [[Scott Pelley Firing]] · [[60 Minutes]] · [[CBS News]] · [[CBS Timeline]] · [[Bill Owens]] · [[Nick Bilton]] - [[Bari Weiss]] · [[The Free Press]] · [[Skydance-Paramount]] · [[Media Capture]] · [[Paramount Timeline]]