I am GenX And I’m Not Going To Take It Anymore

Pelley: There was an imperative to move our coverage in the direction of the president, to put a thumb on the scale, if you will, in terms of the president’s viewpoint. Stories were getting pulled because there was no administration voice in the story. This was after many weeks, even months, of trying to get someone in the administration to talk to us and being told flatly, “No, there’s no way you’re going to talk to you.” Those stories ended up, for the most part, getting back on the air again without the administration speaking because pulling them didn’t do any good either. So what we had was a situation that I’d never seen. I was at CBS News almost 40 years and at 60 Minutes almost 30 years, and I had never seen anything like this. This was corporate influence coming into the news division, saying, “We want you to report stories with this particular bent in terms of politics.” It was anathema to all of us who’d worked at 60 Minutes for so many years, and we fought a battle against it. We pushed back against it, and that led to, last year, the complete gutting of 60 Minutes, in which, in one morning, without warning or, still today, without explanation, the entire senior staff, including the executive producer, were all wiped out and replaced by new people that I have to assume the corporation decided would be more amenable to their kind of reporting of the news.