Ben Shapiro says Scott Pelley “reads stuff from a teleprompter on camera” and praises Nick Bilton for firing him: “This is how you should treat insubordination”
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From the June 3, 2026, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Let me just explain, the qualifications for being a reporter is you go and report. It's not as though you're a doctor. It is incredible to me when people talk about qualifications in the journalistic world. Oh, you went to J school. You know what J school is? J school, for the vast majority of people, is you sit through a bunch of classes where they don't teach you anything to do with journalism. They teach you a bunch of thematic narrative stuff. And then you — like, what are the things you have to learn in J school that make you a journalist?
This is why I don't describe people typically as journalists. I say that they do acts of journalism because you have a normal person who does an act of journalism. The idea that journalism is a job for which you require a license or a qualification is ridiculous. There — by the way, there are very few jobs where qualifications actually matter, like heart surgeon. That's one where a qualification matters. Scott Pelley standing on his qualifications while Bari Weiss, who was an editor at The New York Times before she started the Free Press, one of the most successful independent journalistic endeavors in America.
That somehow she has no qualifications, but Scott Pelley, who reads stuff from a teleprompter on camera, that he is captain qualifications is absurd.
He says 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? Well, Bilton tried to be nice. He said, I will show you that's what I have to say. That's my plan over the next two weeks. I'll be meeting with everyone. I'm very excited to meet with everyone, yourself included.
My only regret here is that Bilton didn't respond with, show yourself out. The door is that away. You don't want to be here? Enjoy. Well, he was, in fact, fired. He received a letter from Nick Bilton, and here's what the letter said.
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That is a great letter. Nick Bilton's first courageous act as executive producer of 60 Minutes. Applause for Nick Bilton. This alone means that his tenure has been worth it because that letter is fabulous. By the way, this is how you should treat insubordination. That is precisely what he should do. I've said it before. I think that when Bari was made head of CBS News, the only mistake I think that Bari made was not firing more people because she had a bunch of people, the CBS News deep state, shall we say, who are deeply, deeply invested in her failure.