Scott Pelley Was A Highly Paid Propagandist

CBS News fired Scott Pelley on Tuesday, and his reaction only confirmed what we already knew — Pelley was a high paid propagandist masquerading as a journalist.

NBC News reported that Pelley’s firing came after he accused Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes during a “heated” meeting with a new 60 Minutes producer.

“She does not love this place,” Pelley reportedly told the producer. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

The dispute reportedly involved the firing of correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who clashed with Weiss last year after Weiss postponed the release of a segment about the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan men sent to prisons in El Salvador. Notably, the original segment was heavily biased and failed to include statements from the White House and Department of Homeland Security, despite the story involving the two entities. Weiss insisted the story include responses from both entities.

In other words, Weiss insisted on basic journalism.

But apparently that was controversial enough — and partially worth losing his career over — for Pelley.

Following his firing, Pelley accused the network of firing him for political reasons in a statement.

“The new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration,” Pelley said. “The waste is heartbreaking.”

“Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.”

But Pelley’s career doesn’t really reflect the commitment to “fairness against the forces of political bias” that he now claims to champion.

A journalist’s job is to challenge powerful people by using interview opportunities to ask the pressing questions on the minds of the American people and then allow viewers to make their own conclusions. A propagandist’s job is to selectively present information and frame stories to guide their audience toward a preferred conclusion.

Pelley did the latter more often than not.

During a 2019 interview with Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and then lied about it under oath multiple times, Pelley framed the leak as if it were a praise-worthy effort to “correct” a story that was in the public interest. He also accepted McCabe’s excuse that he was merely “confused” by the investigators’ questions when he lied not once, not twice, but three times. Pelley also said “If the inspector general is right about McCabe lying,” as if to subtly question the findings of the report and cast a shadow of doubt. McCabe was also able to claim he was fired because he “opened a case against the President of the United States” and not that he lied under oath.

In his 2023 interview with then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, Pelley asked Garland about the timing of the indictments against Donald Trump. As Garland repeatedly insisted the DOJ was not political, Pelley jumped in to, as The Federalist’s Kylee Griswold wrote, “to clarify the attorney general’s answer.”

“The investigation itself has determined the timing,” Pelley offered to Garland, essentially giving Garland the defense he should have made to sound less politically motivated.

“Yes, exactly right,” Garland replied.

Rather than pressing Garland on why the DOJ chose to bring unprecedented political charges against the leading opposition candidate in the middle of a presidential election, Pelley instead focused on trying to help Garland articulate the DOJ’s decision. But a journalist’s job is to look at anything critically and ask tough questions when needed. A lot of Americans already suspected the DOJ was being weaponized — a good moment for Pelley to grill Garland on some of the concerns Americans had. Instead, he sounded more like a communications advisor.

Or take the time when Pelley interviewed Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich. The segment was supposedly meant to review the “book ban” push by parents concerned about pornography and other inappropriate material in school libraries. But as Auguste Meyrat wrote in these pages, “Pelley and his team shamelessly edited the whole segment to push a leftist narrative about book bans and parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty.”

CBS News cut a portion of the interview where Justice read portions of books that were available in elementary school libraries. Those passages were crucial to the nationwide debate since they allowed readers to judge for themselves whether the books were appropriate. But by removing that necessary context, CBS News (and Pelley) made it seem like Justice and Moms for Liberty were just irrational and objecting to books for no reason.

Just last year, Pelley interviewed left-wing political hack Marc Elias, claiming it was “nearly impossible to get anyone on camera for this story, because of the fear now running through our system of justice.” Notably, a cursory search does not turn up any times in which Pelley spoke of the “fear now running through our system of justice” when then-president Joe Biden’s DOJ was targeting its political adversaries.

Pelley did not disclose to viewers that Elias represented Kamala Harris’ campaign and the Democratic National Committee, nor did he mention that when Elias worked for Hillary Clinton and was responsible for hiring the law firm, Fusion GPS, for opposition research against Trump. Fusion GPS would later hire Christopher Steele to write the phony “Steele dossier,” which was then used the launch the Russia Collusion hoax.

Those things are not minor details. Instead they are the type of facts that viewers would need in order to weigh the credibility of the person speaking (in this case, Elias). But Pelley left them out.

Then of course there was the commencement address that Pelley gave at the Wake Forest University graduation in 2025. Pelley called the time a “moment of crisis” and compared it to the Second World War.

“Our country is in peril,” he told graduates. But that’s how political activists speak, not journalists.

So what then do you call a political activist who plays the role of a journalist?

Well, a paid propagandist.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2