Ed Morrissey, writing for Hot Air, thinks Scott Pelley got what he deserved and Bari Weiss is doing a good job running CBS News:

And Pelley forgot the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. Instead, Pelley convinced himself of his own virtue and torched his own position — and if Bilton’s letter is accurate, in as mean-spirited and conceited a manner as possible. Pelley could have chosen a dignified resignation under protest, but instead pulled a power move in an attempt to intimidate Bilton, Weiss, and Ellison, only to discover that no one feared his absence. In fact, they’re probably happy to cut him loose.

There’s always at least one person in these situations who thinks they’re untouchable. A wise executive knows to start by making an example of that person, and then see how many other people think they’re indispensable. It’s not as if TV news jobs are expanding these days, after all. Pelley’s going to find out the hard way that no one’s paying $5 million a year to emote into a camera from other people’s copy.

It doesn’t even enter this man’s little mind that Pelley wasn’t concerned about his job, wasn’t concerned about his salary, but was concerned only with the integrity of the institution to which he’d committed decades of his career, and that he saw as his duty the need to stand up for his remaining and former colleagues. That Pelley himself has integrity. To the Trump lickspittles, everything is performative. They don’t just lack integrity, they don’t believe integrity is real.

Katie Notopoulos:

The Scott Pelley story to me is a lesson in how if you work hard enough in your career to get Fuck You Money, the real reward is the day you need to say it, you can.

Link: hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2026/06/03/cbs-fires-scott-pelley…

Paramount’s “Press Express” page promoting 60 Minutes still lists all eight correspondents from the 2025–2026 season, the program’s 58th. (Perhaps they fired the person responsible for keeping the cast page up to date.) In the order they appear on Paramount’s listing:

• Lesley Stahl
• Scott Pelley — fired today
• Bill Whitaker
• Anderson Cooper — left on his own after 20 years
• Sharyn Alfonsi — fired last week
• L. Jon Wertheim
• Cecilia Vega — fired last week
• Norah O’Donnell

A big part of the brand for 60 Minutes is that the show doesn’t change. Someone who last saw it 40 years ago would instantly recognize it today. There’s no silly fucking theme song. There’s no glossy set. There’s a ticking stopwatch, a logotype set in Microgramma/Eurostile, and correspondents sit against a black background. And correspondents measure their tenure not by years but by decades. Of the original hosts, Harry Reasoner was there for 23 years (and left the cast only upon his death at 68 in 1991), Dan Rather was there for 38 years, Mike Wallace for 40, and Morley Safer for 48. 48 years! Of the current hosts, Lesley Stahl has been there since 1991. I graduated high school that year.

In just six months since David Ellison bought CBS and installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, they’ve fired or lost half their on-air talent, and of the four who remain, Wertheim and O’Donnell are only part-time (O’Donnell’s title is “CBS News senior correspondent”, not “60 Minutes correspondent”), Whitaker is 74 years old, and Stahl is 84.

Behind the cameras, longtime executive producer Bill Owens resigned in protest of corporate interference a year ago, in the cowardly run-up to Ellison’s acquisition of CBS. Last week Weiss fired Owens’s successor, Tanya Simon, who had been with the program for 30 years, replacing her with Nick Bilton, who not only had never worked at 60 Minutes, but has never worked in TV news period. Weiss also fired executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, who’d been at the show for 28 years.

It seems untenable for Stahl or Whitaker to remain on the show. Pelley called it what it was in Bilton’s ham-fisted staff meeting Monday: the murder of the institution.

Link: paramountpressexpress.com/cbs-news-and-stations/shows/60…

Nate Silver, back in April, under the headline “Social Media Is Turning Into a Freak Show”, where by “social media” he mostly discusses Twitter/X:

But what does that remaining traffic consist of? I recently came across a bubble chart depicting the Twitter accounts that had received the most “engagement” in February 2026. It was depressing: most of the top accounts were extremely low-quality and highly partisan. I hadn’t even heard of many of them and only follow a handful of the top accounts. So I tracked down the original data myself and, with help from Claude, made my own improved version of the chart. Here, voilà, are the Twitter accounts with the most engagement so far in 2026:

It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning. But I’d argue there’s an equally important trend: the top accounts are of incredibly low quality. Elon, with the algorithmic boost he built in for himself, is at the eye of the storm, of course. But “Catturd” literally gets far more engagement than the New York Times, for instance.

There’s a common argument from proponents of the Musk-era X that the only problem is that left-leaning people have abandoned the platform. That the X algorithm is a contest and if only right-leaning accounts are playing, of course they’re winning. This is nonsense. The whole thing is rigged. Elon Musk’s outsized prominence as the most-engaged-with account is proof of that. Twitter existed for 16 years before Musk bought it. He wasn’t even close to the biggest account during that era. Then he bought it. Now his account is the biggest.

As Silver’s data analysis shows, Musk’s X is not just dominated by right-wing accounts, it’s dominated by “who the hell is that?” right-wing slop accounts.

The only way not to lose a rigged game is to refuse to play. X is still a thing. A lot of people, companies, and organizations still post there — treat it like their blogs — exclusively. I still wind up linking to posts on X because that’s where they are. That’s a whole separate discussion. But anyone who’s trying to “compete” there with subject matter that is even vaguely political has no chance of success unless what they’re posting is what Elon Musk wants to see promoted. It’s not like his thumb is on the scale, it’s like an anvil is on the scale. The conundrum is that there are still a lot interesting people posting interesting things there.

Link: natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April:

I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.

These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are.

Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice.

Link: niemanlab.org/2026/04/do-links-hurt-news-publishers-on…

We loved watching Simone Giertz prototype her Laundry Chair, a swivel-arm chair valet, a couple years ago. The piece went viral on Instagram.

Giertz recently bet that there was enough demand to start a Kickstarter for it, and boy, was she right: Her Laundry Chair campaign has racked up $750,000 in the few days since it launched.

To refresh your memory, Giertz observed the need for a place to toss clothes that are not dirty enough to launder, but not clean enough to go back in the drawer. Reasoning that most people simply use a chair for the task, she resolved to design one better suited to the purpose.

Thankfully, Giertz has not cheaped out on the materials, even though the piece is headed for production. The frame is solid hardwood. The upholstery isn't synthetic, but 100% cotton corduroy. The swivel mechanism relies on ball bearings.

There are still a few $899 Early Bird pledge slots available. The chair is expected to ship (flatpack, of course) in November.

Beyond Tupperware: Italian company B!POD makes this DRO!D, a compact, powerful rechargeable vacuum unit.

It's designed to suck about 95% of the oxygen out of the company's food storage containers.

This vastly extends the lifespan of leftovers, or fresh produce or cheese; the company claims food lasts up to five times longer.

The system is sold as a set, consisting of one DRO!D and three different sizes of food container. It runs €340 (USD $400).

The commercial for the system is a bit weird: