Scott Pelley is the pompous windbag of 60 Minutes. Ted Knight played a character like Pelley for laughs in days of old on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Pelley amped up the character and drained it of humor. He is beyond satire. An insufferable fool, he plays himself seriously.
Beyond the blissful ignorance represented by the blue pill, to be redpelleyed is to add elements of pomposity, arrogance, condescension, and willful blindness to intensely mistaken belief. It comes naturally to those who are afflicted. An apparatchik at heart, Pelley glories in spouting the party line as though it is the self-evident truth. He believes it is the higher wisdom.
He is drunk on self-love. He needs an intervention, but he is incorrigible. He has no friend who can help him.
CBS News terminated Pelley for cause yesterday. The New York Times has posted the letter to Pelley advising him of his termination by the new executive producer of 60 Minutes.
It must represent the consummation he devoutly wished. It comports with his heroic conception of himself. He has sacrificed his prestigious position with the network to go out in a blaze of glory. Let us hope that he seizes the opportunity to appear for an interview by Dan Rather on one of Rather’s interview podcasts.
Rather and Pelley can review the unfairness of it all. Rather can also fix him up with a writer like Digby Diehl to write the inevitable memoir, a memoir like Rather’s own Rather Outspoken.
Pelley will land on his feet in some prestigious American institution that is an enemy of approximately everything we believe in — the Kennedy School of Government, say, or, closer to home, the Columbia Journalism School. I can see it now. “Professor Pelley, show us how you gnawed your glasses on 60 Minutes when Andrew McCabe told you the FBI had opened counterintelligence and obstruction of justice investigations on President Trump.”
