Longtime CBS correspondent Scott Pelley lived many workersâ fantasy: Telling your boss off
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Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Add AP News on Google Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Share NEW YORK (AP) â As if Scott Pelleyâs years in a glamorous, globetrotting, seven-figure dream job werenât enough, heâs pulled off one more thing to stir your envy: a cutting takedown of his boss that went loudly public. The â60 Minutesâ correspondentâs searing rebuke of CBS management this week, in which he questioned his bossesâ credentials and motives, may have ended in his firing, but amounted to the sort of mouthing-off that workplace peons typically only fantasize about. âThatâs the American dream â to be able to tell off your boss and walk out the door,â says Zach Tyra, a 40-year-old data analyst from Jones, Oklahoma, who found a kindred spirit in the newsman, recalling his own experience with a former boss he said was clueless. âI couldnât do what Scott Pelley did because I didnât have the safety net or the resources or the network that he has. I couldnât tell my boss to stick it. I just had to sit there and eat it.â Pelleyâs message may have been delivered in the measured baritone of someone polished by decades on the airwaves. But his backtalk stirred many whoâve felt the simmering rage of feeling a clueless boss was turning their days into a nightmare.
âItâs also kind of weird, like, Pelley isnât some blue-collar hero. Thereâs a wide gap between, like, Pelley and your local everyday guy down at the hardware store,â Tyra says. âBut I think everyone can relate to standing up for what they believe.â A staff meeting that went deeply awry Pelleyâs dressing-down came in a Monday staff meeting with the new executive producer of â60 Minutes,â Nick Bilton, brought aboard by Bari Weiss, who became CBS Newsâ editor-in-chief in October. The correspondent reportedly grilled Bilton about the firings last week of Biltonâs predecessor, Tanya Simon, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, accusing management of âmurderingâ the program, a revered cornerstone of TV journalism and a mainstay of Sunday nights for nearly six decades. âShe has no qualifications for her job,â Pelley said of Weiss, according to the media news site Status, which reported he then turned his ire at Bilton. âYou have slender qualifications for this job.â In firing Pelley, Bilton called his outburst an âambushâ of âremarkable incivility and contempt.â But, with Pelley becoming a proxy for the American worker, others cheered. Read More Parry Headrick, who runs a public relations firm in Boston, was immediately transported to his days as a young reporter at a small newspaper, where he had been carefully chronicling the trials of people who fell ill from what was believed to be exposure to toxic waste. He had earned the trust of one family only to find editors plastered a headline on the story that reduced the sick child to a âtoxic boyâ and caused Headrick to lose all faith in his bosses.
