The heartbreaking loyalty of Scott Pelley

On Sunday, the New York Times published an explosive interview with “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley, his first since he was fired from CBS News last week. In it, Pelley detailed a series of serious allegations — most notably, that editor in chief Bari Weiss “was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf” of the Trump administration — that dominated the news cycle that followed.

But as I listened to the hourlong conversation, what I found most striking were his objections to the way he felt Weiss and her new lieutenant Nick Bilton treated him and his colleagues. That’s when Pelley was most emotional, at times tearing up and pausing to steady his voice.

“That’s a family at ’60 Minutes,'” he said. “It’s a very loving and empathetic organization, and we were met with cold, callous indifference.”

In the interview, Pelley described a variety of ways he saw this callous indifference manifest. He was floored that Bilton, in his first meeting with employees in the wake of recent firings, read a prepared statement from his phone. He choked up as he described how his executive producer Tanya Simon was summarily dismissed and told to clear out her desk by 5pm. He felt so betrayed by the dismissal of his colleagues that he compared it to “your spouse being murdered.”

Cold and callous? Sure. But coldness and callousness are now pretty standard in corporate America, where lawyered statements, management shakeups, and abrupt firings have become the norm. Why was he so surprised? I wondered if his expectations were out of touch with the times — maybe even naive. Even the bright-eyed Gen Zers I talk to know not to expect much from our employers these days.

But listening to Pelley, who’d worked at the network since 1989, it’s impossible not to be moved by the fierce loyalty he and his colleagues demonstrated to CBS News. And up until last week, it sounds like CBS News demonstrated the same loyalty back to him. By his account, the culture of mutual loyalty at the network somehow managed to stay intact all these years — even as it died across much of corporate America.

Pelley described his colleagues who’ve worked and traveled and dined together for “10, 20, 30 years.” He spoke about how they risked their own lives in war zones in service of their viewers. That forges “very strong bonds, very emotional bonds,” he said. “To have people running CBS News who don’t know that, have never felt that, and don’t understand it, is a tragedy I never expected to see.”

It’s the kind of camaraderie most young people will probably never experience.

For me, the most telling moment was midway through the interview, when Pelley recounted the day he was fired. After being summoned to a meeting with the top brass last Tuesday, he returned to his office to find a whole crowd of his colleagues awaiting news of his fate. They waited with him for hours, even though they had their own families to get home to. Pelley didn’t think much of this until it occurred to him: “This is a vigil.” Hearing this, I was touched and also jealous, that he had this then and he likely had it his whole career, surrounded by all these colleagues who cared so deeply about him that they refused to leave his side. It’s the kind of camaraderie that develops only in the kind of loyal organizations that are becoming rarer by the day. It’s the kind of camaraderie most young people will probably never experience.

Management scholars refer to these expectations of loyalty as a psychological contract. It consists of what you believe you owe your employer and what your employer owes you in return. This contract — however implicit — is foundational in every workplace, and when both parties uphold their end of the bargain, you get a functional organization. But when somebody breaks the contract? That’s the debacle that’s unfolding at CBS News right now — the same debacle that’s wreaked havoc across so many other companies over the last few decades.

It’s perfectly possible for organizations to retire old contracts and forge new ones but until you do, you get a race to the bottom where both parties end up doing less and less for each other. That can’t be good news for “60 Minutes” — for its employees, for its executives, or for the millions of people who watch it every week.

For someone like Pelley, who is out of the job he devoted nearly four decades to, the normal thing to do is to become disloyal yourself. I’ve heard it from so many people over the years: I’ll never go above and beyond for a company again. But Pelley remains loyal — to the show he no longer belongs to, as well as the people he no longer works with. That’s why he’s speaking out. “I don’t care about me,” he said. “I am not emotional about this because I have lost this job. I’ve done it for a long time. I’ve had the greatest experiences. But the people I leave behind, treated in this way? That breaks my heart.”

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.