The Murder of ‘60 Minutes’

1. Corporate

This week a bunch of people you’ve likely never heard of were pushed out of 60 Minutes by Bari Weiss. Simultaneously, Weiss handed control of the program to someone else you’ve probably never heard of.

I know how boring that sounds, but it’s important. What is happening at 60 Minutes is a demonstration of how institutions fail in an age of autocracy. And it is an object lesson in the dangers corporate ownership poses to free media.

This is inside baseball. But you need to understand it. Let’s go.

60 Minutes is the crown jewel of American broadcast journalism. When journalism migrated from the page to the screen, it was mostly a bad thing for society. But 60 Minutes was the best-case scenario—an example of what serious investigative journalism could achieve in the TV format.

Part of the show’s success was economic. 60 Minutes didn’t just produce outstanding journalism—it made money. It proved that good journalism could succeed on TV and didn’t need to be regarded as a charity or a loss-leader. In 2024, just as a for-instance, 60 Minutes made $206 million in advertising.

Because of this industry-leading success, the show has always been allowed to run independently within the organization that is CBS News. 60 Minutes was its own beast, a state within a state. The show’s independence was such a big deal that when CBS corporate interfered with it in the 1990s, the whole world took notice and Michael Mann made a big-budget movie about the incident.

That’s the backdrop.

Last fall, David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, purchased Bari Weiss’s pro-Trump website, the Free Press, for $150 million. As part of the deal he put Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she quickly went to work making the division’s products more friendly to Donald Trump. We don’t need to recapitulate the entire history here; it is enough to note that, as a business matter, Weiss’s tenure has been an abject failure. Ratings are down across CBS News properties.

But as a corporate matter, Weiss has been a success. First, as a way of greasing the skids of Ellison’s purchase of Paramount, he publicly signaled that he would give Weiss a prominent role at CBS News long before he bought her. Then, once she was put in charge and started breaking things, she made Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery all the more politically appealing to Trump. Trump publicly praised Weiss, and when Ellison and Netflix got into a bidding war for Warner-Discovery, the president stepped in to thumb the scales and make sure everyone knew that he would approve a sale to Ellison but not to Netflix.

So under Weiss, CBS News has been a failure, both in terms of product and business. The journalism at CBS News is getting worse and the audience is leaving. But the particular manner in which CBS News has failed—by broadcasting its obeisance to Trump—has enabled tremendous success by the division’s corporate parent.

This is what happens in a command economy when the head of the government picks winners and losers. CBS News no longer exists as a unit whose purpose is to create journalism that attracts an audience and drives revenue. Its purpose is to keep the president happy so that Ellison’s other businesses prosper.

It’s not quite right to say that CBS News under Weiss is a charity. It’s more like an ongoing bribe.

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2. 60

Weiss took control of CBS News partway through the show’s season and almost immediately she broke the show’s independence. Despite knowing nothing about either investigative reporting or broadcast journalism, she inserted herself into 60 Minutes, first in trivial ways, and then in big ones: She spiked a story about CECOT and she approached Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been in talks to sit for an interview with Leslie Stahl, and allowed him to choose his own interviewer.

It was clear that Weiss intended to put 60 Minutes completely under her personal control so that the show could no longer upset President Trump. After the current season wrapped last week, Weiss went to work with all of those firings we talked about at the very top.

You might recognize the names of correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. You probably don’t know who Tanya Simon and Draggan Mihailovich are because they were among behind-the-camera producers and editors who run the show. As of this week, Weiss has gotten rid of all of them.

Simon was the executive producer in charge of 60. Weiss replaced her with Nick Bilton, a guy who has written for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and never done a blessed thing in broadcast news—let alone managed a giant organization.¹

Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire ran a piece heartily endorsing Bilton’s hire.