Ex-60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens lauded the show’s veteran correspondent Scott Pelley after he interrupted a meeting with the new executive producer to unload a furious tirade over changes at the program.

While accepting the New York Press Club’s Gabe Pressman Truth to Power Award on Monday,  Owens praised Pelley for the confrontation and told the audience the correspondent had “stood up the way that I did a year ago and I couldn’t be prouder of him,” according to Deadline.

He added: “And I know all the people at 60 Minutes couldn’t be prouder of him.”

The remarks came just hours after news broke of Pelley’s tense clash with new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton.

New details emerged a day later, on Monday, when recordings from the meeting were leaked to multiple news outlets, showing the outburst happened as Bilton attempted to reassure the team that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss “loves 60 Minutes.”

“She’s murdering 60 Minutes. She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it — and she’s doing exactly that,” Pelley reportedly unloaded, according to multiple reports. “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the Evening News have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

Owens resigned from 60 Minutes in April 2025 while CBS parent company Paramount Global was seeking approval for a merger with Skydance.

In his departing memo, Owens cited concerns that he could no longer guarantee editorial independence.

In Monday’s speech, Owens slammed the network’s corporate management and defended staff members who have recently been pushed out.

“They were fired by people who don’t even know what we do, who don’t actually care,” Owens said of the slate of departures that included executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi.

He also took aim at Bilton, a former technology columnist who was installed as the program’s new executive producer last week despite having no background in TV news, Deadline reported.

Referencing broader changes inside the network, Owens argued that CBS’s news output should remain independent journalistically in a thinly veiled swipe at Weiss, a former columnist.

“It’s a pity because CBS News and 60 Minutes are institutions, not places where partisans and ideologues should be employed,” he said.

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