Rachel Maddow is ready to welcome Scott Pelley to MS NOW with open arms after the veteran 60 Minutes correspondent was fired from CBS News on Tuesday (June 2).
Maddow reacted to the breaking news of Pelley’s firing while hosting primary night coverage on Tuesday. She read from the termination letter that the new 60 Minutes executive producer, Nick Bilton, sent to Pelley, in which he accused the longtime reporter of “ambush” and “hijacking” a staff meeting to “disparage” him.
According to the New York Times, during the meeting, Bilton told staff that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss “loves 60 Minutes,” to which Pelley responded, “She’s murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place; she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.”
Maddow said that Bilton’s new appointment as 60 Minutes exec producer is a “sort of bald-faced Hungarian-style oligarchic takeover of that news organization.”
She said she meant that as “sort of a joke,” but also “sort of deadly serious,” adding, “There is nobody more acutely attuned to the value of a free press than those who are trying to take it away.”
Maddow continued, “When the president baldly says, ‘I am going to use the power of the state in order to get the media that I want,’ and he lines up oligarchic friends in order to do that for him. It’s just, there’s no pretense. There’s no saying this is for any other reason.”
“There’s nothing else going on at CBS News other than what we can see happening at CBS News,” she added before letting it be known that she’d welcome Pelley to MS NOW.
“I don’t know where Scott Pelley will land,” she said. “Frankly, I hope he lands right here. I hope he stays on. I hope he’s on TV tomorrow. And I hope that everybody in journalism and everybody who values a free press figures out ways to outmaneuver the people who are trying to take the free press from us.”
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