Editor’s Note: CBS News fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley last week after he berated his bosses and accused them of "murdering" the news magazine and betraying journalistic principles. In the report below, the author, playwright, and journalist Jonathan Leaf holds up a mirror to reveal the sort of axe-grinding journalism 60 Minutes has been producing for decades. This piece first appeared here in a modified version at Jonathan Leaf’s Substack.

A week ago, former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley arrived for a meeting with his new boss, Nick Bilton, on the CBS News show at which they both work. Pelley took this as an opportunity to lecture and browbeat Bilton. In the meeting, which was recorded and leaked to the press, Pelley publicly accused those whom he works for as lacking credentials as journalists. Singling Bilton out, Pelley said that he had "slender qualifications" for the job of producing 60 Minutes. Necessarily, CBS fired Pelley the next day.

In his posture against Bilton, Pelley portrayed himself as possessing the journalistic credibility his new boss lacked. This is a little like Jeffrey Epstein calling out the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit for their lack of caring about underage girls.

I make this claim based on personal experience.

Let me explain. Ten years ago I received a phone call out of the blue. It was from a genuinely distinguished journalist, Irish-American investigative reporter and filmmaker Phelim McAleer. Phelim was calling me to ask if I wanted to collaborate on a piece of documentary theater. The project was inspired by the true story of Steven Donziger and his legal fight with the oil giant Chevron.

Seven years before, Pelley had presented a laudatory profile of Donziger on 60 Minutes. In Pelley’s accounting, Donziger was a brave and capable attorney who had exposed Chevron for the horrible damage that it had done to the virgin tropical forest of Ecuador and the indigenous people living there. Donziger, Pelley claimed, had exposed Chevron’s past wrongs and won an $18 billion judgment in the process. One-third of that was slated to go to Donziger and his financial backers. The rest was to go either to the downtrodden masses of Ecuador or to the restoration of its primeval landscape.

But in the following seven years another story was revealed. It turned out that Donziger had engaged in blackmail, pandering, fraud, conspiracy, and bribery. Moreover, it was shown that Chevron had reached prior agreements with the Ecuadorian government which absolved it of any responsibility for a future clean-up from the oil spills that were the subject of Donziger’s litigation.

In fact, the real story was that Chevron had tried to prevent the Ecuadorians from building a pipeline that caused most of the damage to their forests, and the government had then robbed the company of most of its investment in the country. On top of that, although Chevron had signed those contracts with the Ecuadorian government that protected the energy giant from future litigation, it had offered compensation—and Donziger had stepped in the way of the proposed deal as it would have left him without his huge payday.

In short, everything about Donziger’s story was false. The "faceless" corporation had tried to behave honorably and had been abused. The radicals in charge of Ecuador had stolen from Chevron and then decided on policies that ruined large stretches of their own nation. Donziger was a crook, liar, and fraud.

Pelley’s reporting was botched for reasons that went beyond his gullibility. Anyone, of course, can be fooled by a skillful conman, but Pelley took things to a new level of deception. In order to make Chevron look bad, his 60 Minutes crew showed only the scarred oil pits that Chevron didn’t have control over and not the ones it did. The latter were sites it had worked diligently to repair.

Donziger’s deceptions were all eventually proven in federal court. For this reason, a federal judge arranged for his disbarment, and Donziger spent almost three years under house arrest, in jail, or in federal prison. Among the charges he was found guilty of was racketeering. That was the true story of the Chevron matter, and it was the subject of the drama that Phelim and I wrote, The $18-Billion Prize. (Perhaps I should put the word "wrote" in quotation marks as almost all of the play was taken directly from the trial testimony that we found in the public archives of the federal court system. Regardless, the result was a wonderful play that received rave reviews when it premiered in 2017.)

Now ask yourself: If you had presented a broadcast lauding Bernie Madoff as a skilled and reputable hedge fund manager or Ted Bundy as a commendable, young pre-law student, wouldn’t you want to make some admission of error? Isn’t that what a serious journalist does?

Well, it is not what Pelley did. In fact, as my talented collaborator Phelim McAleer has pointed out, 60 Minutes still has its 2009 Donziger profile up on CBS News’s and CBS TV’s YouTube channels, with no update or correction. CBS News published an update on their website in 2014 when Donziger lost in court, but does not appear to have published any updates on his subsequent disbarment and criminal conviction.

Pelley is a classic talking-head—someone who started in television and whose whole career has been forged within it. This is the world that the movie Broadcast News depicts. Someone handsome and deep-voiced appears on camera. Others do most or all of the writing and the research.

(Interestingly, the producer of the 2009 Chevron piece, Draggan Mihailovich, was among the top 60 Minutes producers fired late last month by CBS News management, enraging Pelley.)

In Britain, news anchors have traditionally been called "newsreaders." That’s because this is what they are. Their job is to make sure that their hair is coiffed when they read from the teleprompter. Pelley was a male bimbo: a himbo.

Over the years, he made many absurd and bombastic statements. For example, in 2006 he presented a completely uncritical two-part report on climate change. When critics asked him why he didn’t speak to anyone who questioned the assertions of those who said that climate change was an existential threat to humanity, he responded by saying that this idea was akin to Holocaust denial.

By contrast, Pelley’s new bosses are serious journalists. Both forged meaningful careers as writers and editors. Bari Weiss, who is Bilton’s boss and the editor in chief of CBS News, made a name for herself through her work as a writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. After leaving the Times, she started and built up the Free Press, which has two million subscribers and top writers like Sir Niall Ferguson and Nellie Bowles. Bilton also wrote for the Times, and he has been a contributor to Vanity Fair and a documentary filmmaker for HBO. They are genuine writer-editors.

Who will replace Pelley in the talking-head role? There’s been online chatter that Weiss and Bilton are considering trying to recruit Joe Rogan as a replacement for Pelley. While the chatter is probably just that—chatter—the deal has provoked an outburst of dismay in the media establishment. To which I would say: Why not? The job of on-camera talent is that of a performer. Pelley was known to end some broadcasts by taking off his glasses for effect as the camera dramatically panned into him. That was his way of ending on a weighty yet "intimate" note.

I used to edit future CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil’s writing at New York Press. Tony is someone of intelligence, character, and sensitivity. However, let’s be honest: His on-air value starts with his good looks. This is what news personalities ordinarily are required to display. Rogan is a different fish. Yet, while he may not be pretty, he’s shown that he can command an audience. So, would he be any less qualified than Pelley? Or might he be more qualified?

Who’s to say? What can be stated is a provable fact: The main reason 60 Minutes continues to be America’s most-watched news program is its lead-in, NFL football.