OPINION:

Stephen Colbert has been off the CBS airwaves for two weeks now, and the former host of the now-canceled “Late Show” has scarcely been missed. On Tuesday, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley was fired by CBS, and he likewise will soon be all but forgotten.

With “60 Minutes” a mainstay of Sunday night TV now in its 58th season, its signature stopwatch will keep on ticking without him.

As was the case with Mr. Colbert’s ouster, the left has its collective knickers in a knot over Mr. Pelley’s firing, upset at having lost another of its mouthpieces.

Yet Mr. Pelley brought his firing upon himself with a widely reported temper tantrum Monday in which he was critical of his new bosses at the so-called Tiffany Network.

There is no way Mr. Pelley could have been surprised when the ax fell after his unhinged outburst at an all-hands staff meeting with CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton. Ms. Weiss hired Mr. Bilton as executive producer of “60 Minutes.”

In the meeting, Mr. Pelley excoriated them for making changes to the program that he apparently had not approved. Among the unsubstantiated accusations: that the show is trying to curry favor with the Trump administration in its reporting.

The entertainment industry publication Variety reported Monday that Mr. Pelley had “unloaded a verbal barrage on Bilton … alleging that the new executive editor lacked credentials to lead the show, as did Ms. Weiss, who Mr. Pelley accused of ‘murdering’ the program.”

We can think of no employer who would have turned the other cheek on that sort of insubordination and kept Mr. Pelley on its payroll.

Yet this was not the first time Mr. Pelley, 68, a former anchor of CBS’s “Evening News,” had revealed his liberal bias.

On the Feb. 16, 2025, episode of “60 Minutes,” for example, he narrated a 13-minute segment titled “28 Days” about the first four weeks of President Trump’s second term.

The show’s opening tease previewed the ominous tone of the report: “It’s too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution, but in just 28 days, he’s reinterpreted the 14th Amendment and closed agencies that Congress mandated by law.”

The report featured two federal contractors complaining that they had been fired with minimal notice from their jobs at the U.S. Agency for International Development, one of the first agencies the Trump administration targeted for housecleaning of waste, fraud and abuse.

Mr. Pelley conspicuously failed to mention the well-publicized list of notorious USAID programs that had squandered hundreds of millions of federal dollars on wasteful projects abroad. Many had promoted radical diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as LGBTQ agendas.

He then let left-wing Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck dismiss Mr. Trump’s claims of waste and fraud out of hand as just a “fig leaf” to mask a power grab.

Mr. Pelley further failed to identify one of the two dismissed USAID consultants he interviewed as Kristina Drye, a speechwriter for President Biden’s USAID chief, Samantha Power. Mr. Trump was fully within his rights to send the Biden holdover packing.

In like fashion, two years earlier, on Jan. 2, 2023, Mr. Pelley’s “60 Minutes” report on climate change was apocalyptic in its alarmism. Yet shunning any semblance of context, Mr. Pelley made no mention of the countless instances, since 1967, in which climate alarmists have been wrong in their “Chicken Little” predictions.

He could have cited Zerohedge.com, which just two days earlier had painstakingly detailed all that in a year-end report, “2022, Same S—-, Different Year: 55 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions.”

Both were examples of Mr. Pelley’s bias by omission.

No one should shed any tears for Mr. Pelley as he joins two other “60 Minutes” correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, who were shown the door last week. (Ms. Alfonsi had likewise complained about Weiss & Co. supposedly trying to get in good with the White House after one of her stories was held for further reporting and editing. It ultimately aired.)

It is all very sad, inasmuch as “60 Minutes” was once considered the gold standard of broadcast journalism. Regrettably, not so much anymore. Still, it can be again with new management and presumably three new correspondents in place ahead of the show’s 59th season starting in September.

Make “60 Minutes” great again.