Unremarkable dweeb Nick Bilton has been the executive producer of 60 Minutes for less than a week, and he has already written his name into the history books as one of the media industry's most pathetic bosses.
Bilton's week started with him getting colossally owned during his first all-hands meeting with 60 Minutes staffers, a meeting that had to be cut short because of how badly longtime correspondent Scott Pelley was big-dogging his new boss by simply pointing out Bilton's lack of credentials and asking him to explain why a bunch of seasoned and well-respected 60 Minutes employees had been fired. Monday night, news broke that Bilton, having had some time to stew on getting turned inside out by a member of his own staff, has fired Pelley.
Several media reporters and publications circulated the email that Bilton sent to Pelley. You can almost hear Bilton sniveling:
While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility—enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress.
This is a paragraph that really captures a specific indignity of having a job. You can spend 37 years in your field, building a résumé and level of expertise that rivals anyone else's in the industry, and then one day you can get shitcanned by some unqualified idiot just because you dared to point out that his credentials don't inspire a lot of confidence in his ability to lead. When Bilton writes "I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling," he's talking about a portfolio of absolutely useless tech columns and a period of time when he was shamelessly pretending like he broke the Theranos scandal. He is a mediocrity, and he is now making consequential personnel decisions for broadcast television's most durable and respected news program based on his own hurt feelings.
After his firing, Pelley released his own statement, which provided some details that go some way towards explaining why he was feeling so hostile towards Bari Weiss's latest handpicked stooge. It reads in part:
When stewardship of the program passed to my colleagues and me, our responsibility was to expand energetically into a new age of media technology while preserving the values our audience expects. Now, the new owner of our network is casting this legend aside, apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.
The waste is heartbreaking.
Last month, 60 Minutes lost its DNA when our entire senior leadership and two of our best on-air correspondents were cruelly fired without cause. Good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience. They stood for fairness against the forces of political bias; they stood for professionalism against chaos.
For my part, new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.
I suppose there's a lesson in here about hubris. Bilton, somewhere in his heart, must know that he is and always has been a hack. That didn't prevent him from carving out a comfortable and even somewhat glamorous career for himself, which he was in the midst of enjoying in relative peace just one week ago. Making documentaries and writing screenplays for Martin Scorsese projects is about as good as it gets for a guy like Bilton, and yet that somehow wasn't enough for him. He thought it would be a good idea to move across the country and throw his lot in with Weiss. Now he's stuck doing a job he doesn't know how to do at a place where none of his colleagues respect him, and people who otherwise would have never heard of him are learning to hate his guts. Nick, buddy, you played yourself.
