Scott Pelley

Scott Cameron Pelley is a veteran American broadcast journalist and author who spent 37 years at CBS News. He served as anchor of the CBS Evening News and was the most decorated correspondent in 60 Minutes history, winning 51 Emmy Awards before his firing from the network in June 2026.

Scott Pelley Wiki-Bio

Family Members

Education

Early Life

Scott Pelley was born on July 28, 1957, in San Antonio, Texas, and moved to Lubbock, Texas at age three, where he grew up. At just 15 years old in 1972, he secured his first job as a copyboy at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, feeding news wire teletype machines from the Associated Press and Reuters.

That early exposure to real-time global events in a working newsroom set the foundation for his entire career. He enrolled at Texas Tech University in Lubbock to study journalism but left just four credit hours short of completing his degree, choosing to pursue full-time broadcast opportunities instead.

Scott Pelley Family Background

Pelley’s parents ran a practical, business-oriented household in mid-century West Texas. His father, John Elmer Pelley Jr., operated used car lots as an independent entrepreneur, while his mother, Wanda Graves Pelley, worked as a real estate agent.

This working-class Texas upbringing gave Pelley a grounded perspective on everyday American economic life — themes that would later surface powerfully in his coverage of the 2008 financial crisis and domestic labor policy. He married Jane Boone, a former television reporter and advertising executive, on August 20, 1983. Their two children, son Reece and daughter Blair, were raised largely outside the media spotlight. The family’s faith life was centered at the Preston Hollow United Methodist Church in Dallas, where both children were baptized.

Career

Pelley began his broadcast career at KSEL-TV in Lubbock from 1975 to 1978, then moved to KXAS-TV in Dallas from 1978 to 1981, followed by WFAA-TV in Dallas. In 1989, CBS News hired him as a national network correspondent, launching an unbroken 37-year tenure with the organization. He covered the Gulf War in 1991, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and served as Chief White House Correspondent from 1997 to 1999, during which he broke the news that Monica Lewinsky had become a cooperating witness in the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

He joined 60 Minutes as a correspondent in 2004 and became the most awarded journalist in the program’s history. His reporting took him to active war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Ukraine. In 2011, CBS named him anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News, where he added over 1.5 million daily viewers — the fastest audience growth at the broadcast since the era of Walter Cronkite. He stepped down from the anchor chair in 2017 to return full-time to 60 Minutes.

In June 2026, Pelley was terminated by CBS News after a highly public confrontation with newly installed Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and new executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley had refused to alter a sensitive investigative report on a Minneapolis ICE shooting, claiming leadership demanded changes that would “inject falsehoods and bias” into the story. He publicly accused Weiss of trying to appease the Trump administration. CBS disputed this, citing his conduct at a staff meeting as the cause of his dismissal. His 2019 memoir, Truth Worth Telling, remains a record of his career philosophy and defense of the free press.

Net Worth

Some Lesser Known Facts

• Pelley started his journalism career at age 15 as a copyboy — handling raw news wire teletype machines at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal in 1972.
• He left Texas Tech University just four credit hours short of completing his journalism degree, choosing field experience over finishing the diploma.
• During his first nine months anchoring the CBS Evening News, the broadcast gained over 820,000 new daily viewers — a turnaround widely compared to the Walter Cronkite era.
• He conducted the only television interview with the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden (2012).
• He interviewed Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2015 ahead of the pontiff’s first U.S. visit.
• In 2009, he secured the first Federal Reserve Chairman interview in decades with Ben Bernanke — a landmark moment in financial journalism.
• His 51 Emmy Awards make him the most honored journalist in 60 Minutes‘ 53-year history.
• Pelley received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2016 — considered one of the highest honors in broadcast news.
• He is a Co-Chair of the Board of Overseers at the International Rescue Committee, reflecting a deep personal commitment to refugee relief causes.
• To demonstrate how disinformation spreads online, Pelley authorized a social media consultant to deploy 5,000 Russian-purchased Twitter bots for a 2017 60 Minutes experiment — a tweet that normally got a few dozen interactions received over 4,000 retweets in minutes.
• Pelley maintains an extremely strict personal diet to handle constant international travel and deadlines, reportedly joking it is “probably outlawed by the Geneva Convention” — and his biggest sacrifice within that regimen is giving up pancakes, his favorite food.
• He is an avid sailor, spending his rare free time navigating Connecticut coastal waters — a hobby he famously referenced when he posted a sailboat photo after his firing with the caption: “To all of you who have been so kind, you are the wind in my sails.”
• Decades of reporting from loud political conventions and conflict zones caused significant hearing damage — he described national convention halls as a “tectonic roar.”
• In April 2025, more than a year before his firing, Pelley publicly praised outgoing executive producer Bill Owens on-air, openly criticizing Paramount for “supervising the show’s content” — a rare and early public rebuke of his own parent company.
• The night after his firing, CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil publicly honored Pelley on live television, calling him “a journalist who valued truth at all costs” — a rare act of internal defiance by a sitting anchor.
• The audio recording of Pelley’s confrontational staff meeting with Nick Bilton went viral after being obtained and published by NBC News.
• He described losing 60 Minutes and his colleagues of decades as feeling “like your spouse was murdered” — an emotional analogy from his New York Times podcast interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro that drew widespread attention.
• His firing unfolded against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview, adding significant political pressure to the network at the time.
• He is the author of the 2019 memoir Truth Worth Telling: A Reporter’s Search for Meaning in the Stories of Our Times, published by HarperCollins.

Also check these biography profiles: Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann, Janai Norman

References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Pelley
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62rpdkem0mo
• https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/6/3/us-broadcaster-cbs-fires-60-minutess-scott-pelley-after-clash-with-bosses