Fired 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley accused CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of interfering with a planned segment on the January 2026 killing of Minneapolis protester Renee Good, alleging that Weiss demanded edits that would align the report with President Trump’s public description of the shooting.
In an interview published Sunday by the New York Times, Pelley said Weiss sent an email to his supervisor shortly before the segment was to air requesting changes. Pelley paraphrased the email as asking, “Can we make the protesters look more violent?” and instructing producers to describe Good as “driving toward” the immigration enforcement officer who shot her.
Pelley said he did not have the exact wording of the email but said that was what was communicated to him. He maintained that video of the shooting did not support the description Weiss sought.
“On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car,” Pelley told the Times. “You clearly see Ms Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head [and] kills her.”
Pelley said cell phone video from the officer’s vantage point, which was publicly released, captured the officer using an obscenity to describe Good. The officer said “something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company,” Pelley said.
Pelley argued that Weiss “wanted it described that way” because it matched what Trump had said about the shooting in his capacity as president.
A CBS News spokesperson responded to the accusations, telling the Times that Weiss had made four points in an email exchange on the segment that had “no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible.” The spokesperson added that “not everything she raised made it into the final piece.”
When asked to respond to Pelley’s claim that Weiss was “putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the [Trump] administration,” CBS News said there was “no credible argument” to suggest she was doing that.
The accusation comes amid broader upheaval at 60 Minutes, the 58-year-old newsmagazine. Pelley was fired last week after a staff meeting in which he accused Weiss of “murdering” the show, the Times reported. Executive producer Tanya Simon has been replaced by Nick Bilton, a former Vanity Fair journalist and filmmaker. Multiple correspondents have left in recent months, though veterans Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim are staying on.
Bilton told staff in a memo that “the foundation of 60 Minutes is journalistic independence” and that “we will always pursue stories without fear or favor.”
Pelley also criticized Weiss’s qualifications, saying she “had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News.” He called her lack of TV news background “red flags to me.”
Pelley dismissed Bilton’s push to modernize the show, arguing that changes were already underway. “Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous,” Pelley said. “It’s almost as if Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They’ve just discovered the internet, and they’re running around telling everybody how important it is.”
Pelley said 60 Minutes had “gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had” and that this was “not enough for Ms Weiss.”
The segment in question concerned the killing of Good, a protester, by an immigration enforcement officer during an operation in Minneapolis in January. The incident sparked protests, calls for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and multiple investigations. Pelley’s description of the video, which he said shows Good’s wheels turned away from the officer, contradicts the version of events that Pelley says Weiss sought.