‘An Ice Cube That Is Melting’

As Nick Bilton arrives at CBS News to revolutionize 60 Minutes, a question remains unanswered: Why?

Don Hewitt, the founding father and longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes, which is the most successful news program in US television history, sometimes used the word “tiger” to refer to the show’s correspondents—as in, “the tigers in my cages.” The show, which has been on the air since September of 1968, has managed to attract an enormous, loyal viewership by producing investigative journalism that frequently bares its claws. “I like to believe that my advertised toughness is directed not at drama but at uncovering something that’s worth uncovering,” Mike Wallace, one of Hewitt’s longtime correspondents, told E.J. Kahn Jr., of The New Yorker, in 1982. When Bari Weiss was installed as editor in chief of CBS News, last October, by David Ellison, the new owner of Paramount Skydance, she inherited a 60 Minutes with seven tigers in its cages. Now only three are left—making them something of an endangered species.