Scott Pelley

If the ratings had collapsed or there was some journalistic scandal about a story, then okay, we deserve it.

But we had a triumphal year.

So this is incredibly difficult to understand.

Cecilia Vega,

Sharon Alfonsi, our very best correspondence, just summarily fired for no stated reason and without explanation.

This is one-third of our correspondent corps.

So this isn't like they fired our boss, which they did.

they wiped out a large number of people.

One of the things Nick Bilton said in that ill-fated email to the staff was that he was excited to tell, I'm paraphrasing here, he was excited to tell the staff about the new crop of correspondence.

And when I saw that, I thought, okay,

they're gonna fire all of us eventually.

That's the plan.

He put it in writing for all of us to see.

And so that's why I use these, admittedly for a journalist, hyperbolic terms.

They capture the scale of what happened.

Oh, gosh, furthest thing from my mind.

It hadn't occurred to me.

The president of CBS News, Tom Sabrowski, sent me a note and said, can you come by and talk to us?

And I said, absolutely.

I scheduled about an hour on my calendar for the meeting.