Scott Pelley Makes Explosive Claim About Losing His Job

Scott Pelley fired a shot across the bow Sunday at his old CBS News bosses, Deadline reports. While promoting his new memoir on CNN's Reliable Sources, the veteran anchor said he was let go from the CBS Evening News after complaining about the work environment. "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," said Pelley. "I lost my job at the 'Evening News' because I wouldn’t stop complaining to management about the hostile work environment." Pelley claims he first told David Rhodes, former president of the news division, and didn't get much sympathy.

Pelley told him "that this hostile work environment couldn't go on, for women and men," he says. "And he told me if I kept agitating about that internally then I'd lose my job." Pelley then went to ex-CBS head Les Moonves, who "listened to me very concerned for an hour, asked me some penetrating questions about what was going on." And when Pelley's next contract came up, he says, he was let go. Rhodes tells the Daily Beast that his alleged chat with Pelley "never happened," and a CBS News insider says Pelley and Rhodes simply disliked each other, though Rhodes did have a brash management style. Pelley's remarks follow a major shakeup at CBS, where Moonves and Charlie Rose were ousted amid claims of sexually inappropriate behavior, per Variety. (More media stories.)