'CBS Evening News' anchor Tony Dokoupil honors fired '60 Minutes' correspondent Scott Pelley

How should a national news broadcast say goodbye to its former anchor who was just fired in the wake of a bruising battle with management over the fate of the world's most famous news program and (indeed) perhaps even the fate of the news division itself?

Delicately, right?

Or at all?

Wednesday's edition of "CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil" eschewed both approaches. Instead, the broadcast offered a full-throated salute to Scott Pelley — the "60 Minutes" veteran correspondent who was axed Tuesday — which cited Madisonian principles of press freedom, and effectively portrayed him as one of the most consequential figures in the history of CBS News.

"When I started at CBS, Scott Pelley was in this very chair, and still doing a dozen stories a year for '60 Minutes,' " the current anchor said of his predecessor, who anchored this program from 2011 to 2017. "And amid all of that, [he was] still meeting every new correspondent to share his view of the mission here," Dokoupil said. "He believed freedom of the press, to quote [James] Madison, was ‘the right that guaranteed all the others.’ And the stakes are always that high, and that if you’d made it to CBS News, you were among the best in the world. He worked every single day to live up to that standard."

 Dokoupil then threw to a long fast-cut of Pelley's many stories over a 38-year run at CBS News, most notably the harrowing moment on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when he was engulfed in a cloud of toxic ash and dust after the North Tower collapsed.

Seen from another angle, this five-minute tribute could easily have been interpreted as a rebuke to the current CBS News management — led by Paramount's hand-picked CBS News editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, who orchestrated the firing.

Go figure?

The story/tribute, anchored by respected CBS News veteran Jim Axelrod, began carefully by quoting a Weiss statement — distributed earlier in the day to a handful of media outlets — which read that "despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and find a way back, unfortunately we weren't able to do so and we had to part ways."

The piece then instantly offered a counterstatement by Pelley, who said a discussion with Weiss and CBS News president Tom Cibrowski — formerly the executive producer of "Good Morning America" — "was openly hostile from the start and that no CBS executive at any time suggested a way back. To say so now is disengenous, and they know it."

You don't need to be a frequent watcher of evening news programs to know where this story's sympathies lay. A Wednesday post by the widely read Puck media columnist Dylan Byers said Weiss had retained the services of three high-powered "crisis-management" publicists: You also needn't ask how successful their efforts have been when the network's own news flagship broadcast leans Pelley.

The rest of the TV industry has been closely following the fiasco, including NBC's "Today," which Thursday morning aired a lengthy story by Erin McLaughlin — the segment itself subtly at Pelley's end of the court. McLaughlin concluded by saying she had reached out to CBS for a comment but had not heard back.

Likewise, Newsday reached out to CBS News this morning for a comment, but had not heard back.