60 Minutes Is Burning. Bring Marshmallows.

Long-time readers of this space surely know of my delight in the demise of CBS News and 60 Minutes; I give them far too much attention based on the merits. Of late, though, the misfortunes of the elite communists being slowly turned out of the newsroom at the organ Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather built (talk about two of the most overrated personages in the history of media) have become utterly fascinating.

Last week, Sharyn Alfonsi was fired. She was a correspondent on 60 Minutes who utterly stunk at her job. If you don’t know anything about her but read this column often, you might remember that Alfonsi was the reporter who, two days after Vice President JD Vance went to Munich and delivered a landmark speech about the clear disconnect between the stated values of Western Civilization NATO is supposed to protect and the execution of those values by increasingly authoritarian socialist governments in Europe, delivered a decidedly favorable report on German efforts to suppress online speech the government doesn’t like. (RELATED: Margaret Brennan and the Good Germans at CBS News)

It was one of the most bizarre bits of Trump Derangement Syndrome we’ve ever seen. Alfonsi voiced it like there was nothing particularly untoward in breaking down people’s doors and pilfering their phones and computers as a consequence of trolling stupid Green Party communist politicians on Facebook.

Well, now she’s off to Podcast Land, fat severance check in tow. And the old bulls in the 60 Minutes newsroom are quite ornery. CBS News head Bari Weiss hired a veteran investigative journalist, Nick Bilton, as the new executive producer of 60 Minutes. Bilton’s curriculum vitae is more interesting than anybody else at that show, if for no other reason than Martin Scorsese has, to my knowledge, not asked any of them to write the screenplay for a movie. The Bilton hire coincided, if it wasn’t consequential, in Alfonsi being let go along with Cecilia Vega, another of the on-air correspondents, and Draggan Mihailovich, who was the Number Two for Bilton’s predecessor — a woman named Tanya Simon whose father Bob Simon worked for CBS News for about a million years. (RELATED: The New Editor-in-Chief of CBS News Is Not Like the Others)

It’s a big changing of the guard, and it got up in the feels of one very puffy, fussy Scott Pelley, who opened up with both barrels on Bilton at a staff meeting where the latter introduced himself to the crew.

The new head of “60 Minutes” found himself working against the clock in a Monday meeting with staff.

CBS News had hoped to keep Scott Pelley and the remaining correspondents tied to “60 Minutes” on the show, according to a person familiar with CBS News, before reports emerged of a blistering verbal donnybrook between the long-time journalist and Nick Bilton, who was named last week to lead the venerable newsmagzine.

In a meeting held Monday, Pelley lashed out at Bilton and current CBS News management, according to multiple press reports, alleging that Bari Weiss, the CBS News Editor in Chief who orchestrated an overhaul of the program last week, is “murdering ’60 Minutes.” Pelley also alleged that Weiss held “no qualifications for her job” and said Bilton that he has “slender qualifications for this job.”

Part of the disagreement seems to be that Bilton would like the 60 Minutes team to actually do their jobs when they come to work…

Bilton has suggested that he’d like the program to generate even more content. “The show is on the air one day, one night, one hour a week, and to me there is an incredible opportunity to take the show and do a lot of things with it,” he told Variety last week.

As in, embracing the limitless opportunities to produce content that people can stream on platforms like Paramount+. Assuming, of course, that 60 Minutes is capable of producing content people are interested in streaming. These people will brag again and again that they’ve got the highest-rated TV news show in the country, but that’s because it’s the only news show that appears anywhere near prime time, and for half the year it has NFL football games as its lead-in, and for the other half it has a high-end golf tournament more often than not. And they’ve changed utterly nothing about 60 Minutes in half a century, other than, thankfully, getting some of the fossils off their air. (RELATED: The Bell Is Tolling for Puffed-Up, Arrogant Propagandists at CBS)

Though Pelley, Lesley Stahl, and Bill Whitaker are still around, so it’s not like this show doesn’t have whiskers on it.

Pelley also demanded to know why CBS News fired former Simon, Alfonsi and Vega, asking Bilton “why should we expect any of this is going to be any better?” Status reported that Bilton attempted to deflect the queries and wound up ending the meeting prematurely. Charles Forelle, a new CBS News senior editor, recently hired by Weiss from The Wall Street Journal, told Pelley several times he was being “rude,” according to Status, which reported the remarks based on an audio transcript of the meeting it obtained.

CBS News was eager to keep Pelley at the show, according to a person familiar with the situation. This person says senior CBS News executives had reached out to Pelley, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl and Jon Wertheim — the “60 Minutes” correspondents who remain on staff — several times since last week in hopes of convincing them to stick with the program.

Last Friday’s Five Quick Things column got a lot of positive feedback, I noticed, and the theme of that column was pointing out the rather obvious truths nobody seems to have the stones to point out. The fact that Justin Trudeau is pretty obviously Fidel Castro’s bastard son, being one, or that James Talarico is quite obviously not a heterosexual man. Everybody knows these things because it’s quite apparent they’re the case, and yet for some reason, we can’t call them out. (READ MORE: Five Quick Things: Fidelito, At Long Last)

So here’s another one. Scott Pelley knows he’s on borrowed time and has been for quite a while. He’s making himself a pain in the ass so that he can claim to be a victim of “censorship” when he’s let go for a completely different reason — namely, that he’s a leftist hack whose journalistic product is middling at best, that he makes far too much money for the volume of content he produces and the number of eyes it draws, and that his undisciplined and irritating public outbursts are bad for the CBS News brand. Let’s not forget that a much more forgiving CBS News management than this one tried to make Pelley the next Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite back in 2017, and he didn’t last two years before his tenure as CBS News’ anchor collapsed in a heap. They didn’t fire him altogether then; they parked him at 60 Minutes, where he’s drawn a fat check and largely mailed it in ever since. (RELATED: The Agony Of 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley)

And now that the Ellisons own Paramount, the parent company of CBS, and would very much like to make the company somewhat profitable, they’ve brought in Weiss and a new breed of journalists who have a little less sycophantic relationship to elite leftist power politics. Which means Pelley and the rest of the hangers-on from the old regime are going to get evaluated from an objective perspective.

Which is not good news for Scott Pelley.

The statement that CBS is, or was, “eager” to keep Pelley around is an interesting one. It’s clearly a lie, though perhaps a lie agreed upon. Scott Pelley doesn’t have a place in a younger, more free-wheeling version of 60 Minutes, and everyone knows it. But this way, Pelley gets to play martyr to the cause of journalistic integrity, and Weiss and the new bosses at CBS get to pretend that Pelley left on his own and they didn’t fire him with blood dripping from their fangs.

Everybody gets what they want.

The public generally just yawns. Nobody really cares who works at 60 Minutes anymore, and that’s not changing until it’s a completely different show with a brand-new format and a totally different cast of characters.

Still, it’s a great deal of fun watching Scott Pelley preen and inveigh against the new bosses as though he’s the last good man in the news business. If he took the whole show down with him, we still wouldn’t care.