Scott Pelley, the recently fired 60 Minutes anchor who was pulling in $6 million a year to read the news at America, just found out that America stopped listening — and his first reaction was to ask for a citation. In an interview with New York Times journalist Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, Pelley recounted how new CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss walked into her first meeting with senior 60 Minutes staffers and asked the room a simple question: "Why do you think the country thinks you're biased?"

Pelley's response? "What's your metric? Why do you think so? Do you have a poll?"

Yes, really. The man who spent decades telling Americans what to think genuinely needed someone to produce a survey before he'd entertain the possibility that people don't trust him. "Is there a poll?" is the new "Let them eat cake" — except Marie Antoinette at least knew the peasants were upset.

According to Twitchy, Pelley told Garcia-Navarro that he wasn't present for the initial meeting with Weiss but relayed the reaction from his colleagues. "I wasn't there, but that is what I've been told by my colleagues," Pelley said, adding that staffers "were shocked that was sort of her hello to the staff." Shocked. They were shocked that someone walked in and asked why the country hates them. The nerve.

Here's the kicker. There IS a poll. Multiple polls, actually. Gallup has trust in the media sitting at a record-low 28%. YouGov data shows CBS specifically has massive partisan credibility gaps. As social media commentator Erik Telford pointed out on X, the numbers are right there for anyone who bothers to look — which apparently excludes the entire 60 Minutes senior staff.

But Pelley and his colleagues "certainly didn't believe that," as he put it. They didn't believe the public saw them as biased. They didn't think there was a problem. They were living in a hermetically sealed bubble of mutual congratulation, and when Bari Weiss had the audacity to crack the seal and let in some fresh air, they treated her like she'd walked into a cathedral and started yelling.

This is a man who made $6 million a year. Six million dollars to sit behind a desk and deliver the news with the kind of studied gravitas that says "trust me, I went to journalism school." And in all that time, surrounded by all those resources, with all those producers and researchers and fact-checkers, nobody — not one person — walked into his office and said, "Hey Scott, the audience is leaving and they think we're full of it."

Or maybe they did, and he asked them for a poll.

The CBS shakeup under Bari Weiss is the most entertaining thing to happen in network news since Dan Rather tried to take down a president with a font. Pelley got fired. The old guard got shown the door. And the best part is watching them stumble into the sunlight, blinking, confused, genuinely bewildered that the public they claimed to serve had been serving them walking papers for years.

Scott Pelley is the last guy at the party who doesn't know the lights are on and everyone went home. He's still standing by the punch bowl asking if anyone has data to support the claim that the music stopped. We don't need a poll to know the media lost America's trust. We just needed to watch guys like Pelley pretend it never happened.