Bari’s False Case Against ‘60 Minutes’

On Thursday morning, CBS News rocked the media industry, announcing that it had fired “60 Minutes” Executive Producer Tanya Simon, top staffers and two award-winning correspondents in a dramatic shakeup of the crown jewel of American broadcast journalism.

The network offered no public explanation for the “killing,” as former show boss Bill Owens characterized the shock moves to Status, saying only in a press release that it plans to take the show to new heights aimed at expanding its presence in a declining linear television environment. Bari Weiss, the network’s editor in chief, said that technology columnist and documentary producer Nick Bilton—who has no broadcast news or meaningful managerial experience—will now lead the program, and “bring his deep investigative experience and understanding of the technological moment we’re in to’ ‘60 Minutes’ so that its important journalism comes to life for all audiences.”

CBS News President Tom Cibrowski added that “hiring Nick represents a deliberate vision for ‘60 Minutes’ to go beyond an hour on Sunday evenings to become a 360-degree product that reaches audiences wherever they consume information.”

In other words, CBS News brass tried to justify the upheaval they set into motion by suggesting it was necessary to push the iconic newsmagazine into the digital future.

What went unmentioned in the announcement and the bulk of the subsequent reporting, however, was that CBS News had, just days earlier, touted in a press release that “60 Minutes” had “ended its 58th season breaking records across linear and digital” as America’s biggest news program, and had “surpassed 2.5 billion video views on social media—more than doubling its record from last year.”

Under the outgoing team, the network triumphantly declared: “Total video views across ‘60 Minutes’ social platforms are up +185% YoY. The total engagement with our content across ‘60 Minutes’ social platforms is up +137% YoY. Our views for TikTok are up +85% YoY. Our views for Instagram are up +65% YoY. The digital traffic for web articles on CBSNews.com is up +18% YoY.”

For a 58-year-old television newsmagazine, those figures are quite extraordinary. That digital success also came under some of the most difficult conditions imaginable—with Owens, the show’s longtime executive producer, exiting over corporate interference, Paramount shelling out an embarrassing $16 million to Donald Trump, and David Ellison installing Weiss, who began openly undermining the program’s editorial independence.

In an interview on Thursday, Bilton laid out some of his vision for the program, telling Variety, “The show is on the air one day, one night, one hour a week, and to me there is an incredible opportunity to take the show and do a lot of things with it.”

Perhaps. But as the network bragged last week, “60 Minutes” had already built a massive audience well beyond that one Sunday hour, generating 2.5 billion digital views this season. And attempts to turn the program into a franchise are nothing new. The ill-fated midweek spinoff “60 Minutes II” ran for seven seasons before being cancelled, and the short-lived “60 in 6” Quibi-era concept designed specifically to reach younger online audiences was quickly abandoned.

The question, then, isn’t whether “60 Minutes” can grow beyond Sunday nights. It’s why that growth supposedly required firing the people who had just delivered a record digital audience. Weiss’ assertion that she needed to overhaul the most successful and highest-rated news program—one that also continues to rack up the industry’s most prestigious awards—in order to accelerate its digital expansion strains credulity.

Of course, the “60 Minutes” overhaul is Weiss’ highest-stakes gamble yet. The anti-woke The Free Press founder’s previous attempts to reinvent CBS News’ marquee programs have been disastrous. Since Weiss began putting her stamp on “CBS Mornings” and the “CBS Evening News,” both programs have seen their ratings sink to historic lows. That track record makes her decision to dismantle the one CBS News franchise that was actually thriving all the more difficult to justify.

As Status reported this week, current and former staffers viewed the decision to blow up the show as politically motivated. “Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven,” said correspondent Cecilia Vega after being told that she was out. “It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.”

“Since I retired, I often wondered what would happen to ‘60 Minutes,’” Steve Kroft, the longtime show correspondent, told Status. “But I never expected it would be executed by the President of the United States.”

And while Weiss and Ellison are suggesting the changes are part of a sweeping plan to reinvent the network for the 21st century, it’s clear both from inside and outside the network that they are willing to invent whatever rationale is necessary to sacrifice the most successful journalistic institution to satisfy Trump.