Bari Weiss’s Plot Against 60 Minutes
Josef Adalian Vulture
Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, who was fired from this week. (photo: Getty)
Last week, as part of a broader purge of veteran 60 Minutes staffers, the Free Press founder unceremoniously dumped veteran executive producer Tanya Simon and replaced her with Nick Bilton, a tech journalist turned documentary filmmaker who has zero broadcast-news experience. Then on Tuesday, barely 24 hours after longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley forcefully confronted Bilton at a staff meeting about worries he and Weiss were trying to “murder” the show, the duo reacted by firing the TV news icon, accusing him of not maintaining an environment of “trust and mutual respect.”
The result of all this has been a public-relations nightmare for CBS News, the sort of misadventure that in a different time would have prompted speculation Weiss was on the way out for imperiling the future of one journalism’s most storied franchises. But now? It wouldn’t shock me to learn that Paramount CEO David Ellison had called to congratulate Weiss and Bilton on a job well done.
If you’re part of CBS management, or just someone who likes to kiss up to power, the above summary of events will probably come off as overblown and perhaps even a bit conspiratorial. In their public statements, Bilton, Weiss, and other CBS execs have pushed back on the argument advanced by Pelley (and many others) that the network is trying to neuter 60 Minutes, insisting they are only looking to strengthen the franchise and ensure its long-term survival. “We have huge ambition for 60 Minutes to reach new heights through deep, revelatory journalism that breaks news, exposes wrongdoing, widens public understanding and forces accountability from every institution and every center of power,” Weiss said in a prepared statement last week announcing Bilton’s hiring. And Bilton seemed indignant when Pelley confronted him Monday with the notion that either he or Weiss might have anything but the best intentions regarding 60 Minutes. “Bari loves this institution,” he said, according to reporting from multiple outlets.
Leaving aside the extraordinary amount of arrogance — or cluelessness — it takes for Bilton, whose CBS News tenure can be measured in hours, to lecture Pelley about the institution of 60 Minutes, nothing about Weiss’s history at CBS News (or, for that matter, her brief career at the New York Times) suggests she has any sort of reverence for legacy-media tentpoles. If anything, being an all-knowing disrupter who doesn’t care much about tradition is sort of her whole shtick. This is a woman who, after all, created her own university and allowed a bust of herself to be installed in its not-so-hallowed halls. Bilton is entitled to whatever interpretation of Weiss’s intentions helps him sleep at night, but her actions suggest she has not a lick of interest in the pillars — the deliberate journalistic process, the rigorous commitment to facts, aggressively confronting power — that have made 60 Minutes what it is. Instead, as former CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane noted Tuesday, Weiss … Co. are handling the show with anything but care: “They’re juggling some incredibly valuable Fabergé eggs right now — throwing them around the room.”
If 60 Minutes were a distressed asset in need of saving, Weiss would at least be able to trot out the excuse that extreme actions were needed to save the show — “desperate times, desperate measures,” etc. But unlike CBS Mornings and the CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes isn’t struggling, not in the least. Yes, broadcast TV is in decline, but the audience numbers and ad revenue for 60 Minutes are still more than enough to support its budget, and despite what Weiss and Bilton would have you believe, the show (and the larger 60 Minutes brand) actually has a solid social-media and streaming strategy, one that lives across multiple Paramount platforms (Pluto, Paramount+, CBS.com) and on outside channels such as YouTube. It’s one thing for a Weiss or Bilton to argue the need for 60 Minutes to level up even more, to try to be ahead of the curve and find new ways of reaching viewers or making its mission more relevant to audiences who don’t watch on television every Sunday night at 7 p.m. But doing that requires a deliberate strategy, a well-constructed game plan that preserves what’s working while adding in new elements that can expand the show’s already large base audience. Think of what the New York Times has built over the past decade with its games and food verticals, for instance.
But nothing about what Weiss has done with 60 Minutes suggests she’s actually interested in preserving and protecting the franchise, at least not the one she inherited when she joined Paramount last year. Instead, her actions seem designed to accomplish two big things: Humiliate and embarrass any of the entrenched veterans at CBS News who still dare think they are immune to disruption from the Weiss machine, and, yes, reinforce the message to the Trump White House that Weiss, a good soldier at David Ellison’s Paramount, is willing to confront the people and philosophies the broader MAGA movement sees as their enemies — namely, the “liberal” media members who’ve guided legacy shops like CBS News for decades.
On the first point, what Weiss has done with 60 Minutes this past week screams “power move,” no different than Barkhad Abdi’s Somali pirate staring down Tom Hanks and telling him “I’m the captain now.” Not unlike Trump, with his most audacious, norm-defying executive orders, Weiss is acting far outside the normal bounds of TV news-executive leadership, unconstrained by the checks and balances that might normally have prompted her to be more cautious. Everything she has done — every public statement, every leaked memo, every staffing move — has seemingly been in service to the notion that until she arrived, CBS was doing journalism the Wrong Way. She clearly believes the hype that she’s some sort of transformative figure. Rather than give her pause, the fact that so many current and (now) former CBS News staffers disagree with that idea only seems only to have prompted Weiss to dig in deeper on her mission to remake the division in her image. Dumping icons with decades of experience, firing a beloved executive producer who was winning, hiring someone who, like herself, has zero experience in TV news — all of this just underscores the notion that the mantra at CBS News now is Bari Knows Best.
Political Hacks or Useful Idiots?
And that leads back to the other theory about why Weiss has acted in such a seemingly reckless manner with regard to 60 Minutes (and CBS News in general): It’s all about playing nice with the Trump administration as Ellison’s Paramount looks to close on its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. “We can’t ignore what’s taking place there right now,” former CNN anchor Jim Acosta — who knows something himself about being thrown to the wolves to appease the White House — told his fellow legacy-media refugee MacFarlane Tuesday during a podcast conversation. “It seems to me that the Ellisons, along with Bari Weiss — this is an ideological project that they’re on. This is not a journalism project. This was what a lot of people were worried about, that this network was going to be turned into basically a propaganda arm of the administration — and if not a full-blown propaganda arm, a news organization that pulls its punches when it comes to covering people in power right now.”
That last part is key: There are no signs (yet) that Weiss or Ellison want to turn CBS News into another Fox News. And by all accounts, Bilton isn’t a political hack with a far-right agenda (even if he has plenty of experience writing about right-leaning tech executives with mixed reviews for his efforts). But assuming he survives into the fall, Bilton doesn’t have to be a lackey for Trump and MAGA in order to damage the credibility and journalistic sanctity of 60 Minutes. Simply being 30 percent less aggressive on Trump than it was during Simon’s run, or giving right-wing ideas and powerful tech corporations a more friendly platform, would do the trick.
Plus Bilton has already accomplished much of what Ellison and Weiss want simply by agreeing to take the job: His hiring, and the purge of so many 60 Minutes veterans, can be interpreted (reasonably so, I would argue) as part of a broader signal to the Trump White House that Ellison’s Paramount remains eager to confront the people and philosophies the president sees as his enemies. Indeed, rather than run from the drama of the last few days, CNN today reported that the CEO has been fully onboard with her extreme makeover of 60 Minutes, including Pelley’s firing.
Many media observers prior to last week thought Weiss and Ellison wouldn’t mess much with 60 Minutes because they had bigger problems at CBS and, because, you know, the show seemed to be working pretty well. But that line of reasoning didn’t consider that 60 Minutes is a disaster in the eyes of its most-high-profile viewer — Donald Trump. He and his White House have made their displeasure with the show known, even as they engaged with it: He dressed down Norah O’Donnell to her face earlier this spring during an interview with the show. The actions of Weiss and now Bilton sure feel like a down payment on the debt Ellison owes Trump for letting him expand his media empire.
There are other interpretations to explain what has played out at CBS News this week. Given her complete lack of qualifications to run a TV news division, one cannot rule out the possibility that, despite the many adoring acolytes who insist Weiss is one of the century’s great minds, she is simply incompetent in the role of news chief, and these moves are just about her not knowing — or caring to know — how to manage such a large team. Or perhaps she is as brilliant as her boosters believe and hiring Bilton and flushing away decades of on- and off-air experience will prove to be the much-needed colonic that sets up 60 Minutes for another six decades of success. In this scenario, Pelley and those aghast at what she is doing to the show (and CBS News in general) are dinosaurs who refuse to see the asteroid hurling their way.
What seems more likely, however, is that Weiss’s loudest critics are correct and that her goal is exactly what Pelley feared: She’s there to murder 60 Minutes as we’ve known it because some very powerful people want it dead or at least greatly diminished.
