Former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley’s career has taken him to war zones, the Oval Office and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
It’s also led him to question the meaning of leadership. And of life itself.
“Who are you … What is the meaning of life?”
Pelley repeated this phrase throughout a speech Tuesday night at Illinois State University’s Braden Auditorium in the Bone Student Center.
And he shared an answer shaped through the actions of a trio of heroes whose stories he covered — people who found courage and showed their character when it mattered most.
He started with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose career as a comedian left him an unlikely choice to stand against a Russian invasion.
“Think about President Zelensky for a moment. He was a comedian. That was his profession. He was the Stephen Colbert of Ukraine,” Pelley said.
Then came the invasion.
“He has no preparation for this. He has no background for this, except one thing. He knew communications. And he walked out in front of the presidential palace in the middle of the night with his cell phone, and made a selfie video, and said, ‘I'm still here. Your army is still here, and we are going to fight,’” Pelley said.
Pelley asked him where he found the courage.
“You weren't prepared for this. Where does that come from? And he said to me, ‘You have to look yourself in the mirror and ask, who are you?' And in that moment that he was not expecting, when the Russians came at him from three different directions, he discovered who he was. It was always there, but when he needed it, those values rose up in him.”
Pelley, one of the most accomplished and recognizable journalists in the U.S., was fired from 60 Minutes four months ago for challenging the show’s new leadership and defending the program's independence. He spoke to several hundred people as part of the ISU Presidential Speaker Series about leadership in uncertain times.
Along with Zelensky, Pelley cited Iraqi Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, and New York firefighter Orio Palmer, who perished in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
ISIS victim
Murad came forward, at first anonymously, as Pelley was looking for subjects to interview about the ISIS attacks in northern Iraq. Pelley said she was shaking, and plainly terrified to recount her story.
"Let's not do this,” he said.
But she persevered, sharing the story of the men in her village being killed and the women being repeatedly sold and sexually abused. And about halfway through her interview, she gained strength, he said.
“And it finally occurred to me that in the beginning of the interview she was speaking for herself, but by the middle of the interview she was speaking for her people,” said Pelley.
The 60 Minutes story led to her speak and write about about terrorism broadly, and ultimately to the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.
“My story, told honestly and matter-of-factly, is the best weapon I have against terrorism,” she told him.
9/11 fireman
Palmer’s story became public in 2005, after audio from 9/11 told the story of his ascent to the 78th floor, and his attempt to guide firefighters by radio through a fiery stairwell to rescue 600 people above.
“He's leading the entire FDNY contingent in the South Tower, going up the stairwell,” Pelley said.
Then the second tower collapsed.
Pelley recounted a refrigerator magnet at the Palmer house: “Live while you're alive.”
“I think in these examples, Volodymyr Zelensky, Nadia Murad, Battalion Seven Chief Orio Palmer, we have the clues that we need: values, perseverance, courage. What is the meaning of life? What I have learned from meeting these people and so many others like them is very simply this. Don't ask the meaning of life. Life is asking, ‘What's the meaning of you?’”
On journalism
After his talk, Pelley took audience questions, asked by WGLT Executive Director R.C. McBride.
Prompting frequent applause, Pelley addressed subjects ranging from the future of journalism to artificial intelligence.
Despite assaults on branding journalism as “fake news,” he said “there is no democracy without journalism.
“That's what I want to get through to people: that freedom of the press is not, as I said, a carve-out for me or a media company. You have the right to freedom of the press. You have the right to an independent media that is not censored or surveilled by the government."
At the same time, the volume of information makes it more difficult to evaluate.
“We live in this time in which never in human history has more information been available to more people. But we also live in a time when never in human history has more bad information been available to more people,” said Pelley.
“I tell people today to look for news organizations that have reputational risk, where if they get something wrong, it's going to be a scandal … There have been a couple of spectacular failures at 60 Minutes, and Hollywood made movies about both of them,” he said.
