The Insider’s Scoop on 60 Minutes

“There’s no investigative reporting needed to understand what’s going on,” Lowell Bergman says.

60 Minutes, CBS’s flagship news program, is in turmoil. Last week, CBS fired the show’s senior leadership and two prominent on-air correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The network also announced that Tanya Simon, who had been the show’s executive producer, will be replaced by Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist for the New York Times; Bilton has produced a few documentaries but has no television news experience. This week, Scott Pelley, one of 60 Minutes’ biggest stars, confronted Bilton in an all-staff meeting. Pelley told Bilton he had “slender” qualifications for the job he was taking and accused Bari Weiss, the Free Press founder who was appointed to lead CBS News after the Ellison family’s takeover of the network last summer, of “murdering” the show. The next day, Bilton fired Pelley, writing, “I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama.”