Former “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley said he was fired for complaining about the network’s work environment.
Pelley made the allegation on Sunday in an interview with CNN. Pelley lost his position as anchor in May 2017. CBS News began cleaning out his office and moving him to work full-time for “60 Minutes” while he was out on assignment.
“We’ve been through a dark period of the last several years of incompetent management and sort of a hostile work environment within the news division,” Pelley said, referring to CBS News. “I lost my job at the ‘Evening News’ because I wouldn’t stop complaining to management about the hostile work environment.”
“Four or five years ago, I went to the president of the news division and explained to him that this hostile work environment couldn’t go on for women and men,” Pelley said, referring to CBS’s former news division president David Rhodes. “[Rhodes] told me if I kept agitating about that internally, then I’d lose my job.”
Rhodes denied that the incident Pelley described ever happened.
“That simply never happened,” Rhodes told The Daily Beast. “And if he had those conversations about this with anybody, it wasn’t with me.”
Pelley said he went to several other higher-ups in CBS’ management, presumably former CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager and CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves. Both Fager and Moonves were ousted from CBS News amid allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment.
“I went to [Rhodes’s] boss who told me that he didn’t share my concerns. And so, having exhausted the possibilities in the news division, I went to the chairman of the CBS Corporation, who listened to me very concerned for an hour, asked me some penetrating questions about what was going on. I didn’t hear back from him,” Pelley told CNN. “In the next opportunity in my contract, I was let go from the ‘Evening News.’”
CBS News also contested Pelley’s version of events.
“Scott was expressing his own opinion. We disagree. CBS News has been working hard to advocate for an inclusive, safe and dignified workplace for everyone at CBS News and Scott has been a supporter of these efforts,” CBS said in a statement.
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